by C. J. Box
“A cancer you caused,” Marybeth said. “Mom, you broke his heart and stole his ranch.”
Missy made a tut-tut sound with her tongue. “The transfer was perfectly legal, sweetie. Men are so emotional these days. I long for the time when men were tough and stoic. Now all they do is cry and whine and vomit out their feelings. What happened to our warriors? Where have all the cowboys gone, Marybeth?”
Marybeth was speechless.
“Anyway,” Missy said, changing tack, “lately, Bud’s been calling the ranch and my cell phone. He’s threatening me. I want to hire Nate Romanowski to scare him off.”
“Nate doesn’t do things like that,” Marybeth said, alarmed.
Missy smiled. “Then there are obviously things about your friend that you don’t know all that well. You see, The Earl had some research done.”
Marybeth looked at the clock above the stove. “I’ve got to get some work done now. You’ve got to go home.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything to Bud,” Missy said. “All I’m asking is for you to pass along a message to Mr. Romanowski that I’d like to speak with him.”
“I don’t see Nate anymore,” Marybeth said. “He’s in hiding. There are federal warrants out on him, Mom,” she said, practically pleading.
Missy was undeterred. “Your husband talks to him. And Sheridan still does, doesn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” Marybeth lied.
Missy lowered her head slightly and smiled woman-to-woman. “Marybeth, if anyone can get Mr. Romanowski’s attention, it’s you. Do you forget what you told me a few years ago?”
Marybeth sighed and shook her head. “You never fail to disappoint. That’s why I don’t confide in you anymore, Mom. It’s like handing you bullets to use on me at a later date.”
“That’s a cruel thing to say. By the way, did Joe ever know?”
Marybeth’s voice got hard. “Nothing happened. Besides, Joe and I don’t keep secrets from each other.”
Missy chuckled and shook her head. “Oh, dear, you still have so much to learn.”
“I have to get to work,” Marybeth said, pushing away from the table. “Besides, Nate’s in love these days. He’s different. He’d never consider your proposition.”
“Honey,” Missy said, “how do you think he makes a living? Haven’t you ever wondered about that?”
Marybeth had. But like Joe, she never wanted to find out.
“Let Nate make up his own mind,” Missy said. “He’s got a mind of his own, doesn’t he?”
Marybeth refused to respond.
“Just pass along the word,” Missy said, standing up. “That’s all we ask. Tell him we’ll make it more than worthwhile for him. You know The Earl. He’s fed up with Bud, and money’s no object. As for Nate, my understanding is his lady love has a toddler she’s raising on a teacher’s salary. I’m sure she could use some support.”
Marybeth snatched both cups from the table and took them to the sink so she could keep her back to her mother.
“You owe me this one,” Missy said quietly. “Don’t forget what we’ve done for Vicki, the girl you pawned off on us last year. Vicki is getting the very best of care, thanks to us.”
Marybeth closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. Vicki was a foster child who’d entered their lives and needed extensive mental and physical treatment. Marybeth had only one place to turn: Missy. Since then, a pair of grandparents had shown up and offered to take Vicki in when she completed treatment, but Missy still paid the bills. Marybeth knew at the time she was handing her mother more bullets.
“Thank you for the coffee,” Missy said. “Have Nate call me on my cell.”
Marybeth didn’t turn around. She heard her mother call good-bye to Lucy down the hallway and go outside. In a moment, the motor on the black Hummer roared to life.
When the phone rang she snatched it off the cradle, expecting Joe’s voice.
Instead, a man said, “May I please speak to Mr. Joseph Pickett?”
“This is Marybeth Pickett. Who may I ask is calling?”
The man identified himself as Dr. Vincent DeGrasso of the Rimrock Extended Care Facility in Billings, Montana. Marybeth felt a chill sweep through her.
“Joseph’s father is George Pickett, correct?”
“Yes.”
DeGrasso obviously made these kinds of calls often. “I hate to call with bad news, Mrs. Pickett, but Joseph’s father has taken a serious turn. Somehow, he convinced a friend to smuggle in a half gallon of vodka last Sunday, and from what we can tell he drank it all in one sitting. The alcohol reacted with his medication and he went into toxic shock. Right now he’s in the ICU and his organs are shutting down.”
Marybeth closed her eyes. “How long?”
“We doubt he’ll last the week. Even if we can keep him alive, he’s not ever going to be lucid or functional again. A decision needs to be made.”
“My God.”
“There was a moment of consciousness this morning,” DeGrasso said. “George asked for his son. He seemed to realize it was his last request.”
5
A breeze came up and carried the smell of blood, entrails, and tallow from Blue Roanie’s body to Joe, who watched the brothers at work from the aspen grove. They’d draped the hide over a log, then efficiently dismembered the horse. They didn’t speak or gesture but worked in a quiet rhythm of flashing knives and strong bloody hands, with no pauses or wasted movement. Within ten minutes, they’d dismembered it.
All his gear had been gathered and was piled a few yards from the carcass of Blue Roanie. He could see everything he needed but couldn’t get close enough to get it. A hundred yards was too far for an accurate shot with his handgun. If he missed, which he surely would, he would reveal his position and the brothers could make short work of him with the.308 or his shotgun or possibly finish him off with arrows. His Glock had fourteen rounds in the magazine. He wished he had his spare magazines, but they, like the first-aid kit, were in the panniers. Still, though, if he could lure the brothers in close enough and somehow keep them together, he’d have a decent chance of taking them down with the sheer volume of his firepower.
But how to get them close and unaware?
He thought again, I’m in trouble.
And he recalled the day before, when he’d first encountered the brothers. When he’d inadvertently set this ghost train in motion.
He wished now he had ridden away when he had the chance so he could return with a small army to arrest the Brothers Grim. Because now the wind had reversed-as had his opportunity to get away intact-and Camish stepped away from the carcass of Blue Roanie and sniffed at the air like a wolf. They were trying to smell him. And then Camish suddenly pointed in Joe’s direction in the aspen grove.
Oh, no, Joe mouthed. He wouldn’t have thought it possible.
Caleb and Camish wordlessly retrieved their weapons and ran across the meadow in opposite directions. Caleb left with Joe’s carbine, Camish right with his shotgun. They were going to kill him with his own guns. Both brothers were much too far away for Joe to take an accurate shot.
Instinctively, he scrambled back on his haunches. A hammer blow of pain from his right thigh sat him back down, and he gulped air to recover.
He glanced up to see Caleb dart into the left wall of trees. Camish was already gone. They obviously knew he’d been hit and they assumed-correctly-he couldn’t run.
Joe thought they were going to flank him, come at him in a pincer through the trees.
Gritting his teeth from the sting of his wounds, Joe rose to his knees. The position wasn’t as painful as before. He raised the Glock with both hands, and swung it left, then right, looking over the sights toward the trees, hoping to catch one of them in the open, get a clean shot.
His training trumped the urge to try to kill them without warning. He shouted, “Both of you freeze where you are and toss your weapons out into the open. This is OVER. Don’t take it any further.”
He paused,
eyes shooting back and forth for movement of any kind, ears straining for sound.
He continued, “Now step out into the open where I can see you. Keep your hands up and visible at all times.”
No response, until Camish, a full minute later, said from where he was hidden to the right: “Naw, that isn’t how it’s going to work. Right, brother?”
Joe was shocked how close the voice was. Just beyond the thick red buckbrush, the voice was so intimate it was as if Camish were whispering into his ear.
“Fuckin’ A,” said Caleb from the dense juniper and pine on his left.
Said Camish, “I thought we weren’t gonna use that kind of language anymore.”
“Yeah-sorry. I forgot. I just got so caught up in the situation. ”
Joe was taken aback how once again they were talking above him, as if he weren’t there or he didn’t matter and they didn’t care if he heard them. This scared him as much as anything, how they minimized his presence, depersonalized his being. And he thought how much easier it was to be cruel and ruthless when you didn’t consider your adversary an equal.
So he cut in to remind them he was there. He did it with a lie.
“I hate to break it to you boys,” he said, “but you think because you stole my satellite phone it means no one knows where I am. That’s not the case at all. You need to listen to me. Twice a day I call in my coordinates. I called ’em in just before I rode up on Caleb. I haven’t talked to dispatch since then, but they know exactly where I was and which way I was headed. They’ll be able to pinpoint this location within a mile or two, and they’ll be worried. Help is on the way, boys. It could be here anytime.”
Joe glanced up into the sky as if looking for the helicopter he’d just made up. But all he could see were dark afternoon thunderheads tumbling slow motion across the blue sky. There wasn’t even a distant jet trail.
“So let’s end the game,” Joe said, taking their silence as possible evidence of their contemplation.
Camish said to Caleb, “You believe that, brother?”
Caleb snorted, “Fuck no.”
Camish said, “Language.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t believe him either. He’s a liar.”
“Another damned liar,” Caleb said with contempt. “After a while, a man starts to wonder if there’s a single damned one of ’em who doesn’t lie.”
And the afternoon exploded. Joe threw himself to his belly and covered his head with his hands as his shotgun boomed from the left. From the right, Camish fired the.308, squeezing off rounds as quickly as he could pull the trigger. The thin tree trunks around him quivered with the impact of double-ought pellets and.308 slugs. Chunks of bark and dead branches fell around him and the last dry leaves in the aspen grove shimmied to the ground. The air smelled sharply of gunfire.
The shots stopped. Joe did a mental inventory. He wasn’t hit, which was a small miracle. But the proximity of the brothers, and the metal-on-metal sounds of them furiously reloading, convinced him he likely wouldn’t survive another volley. An infusion of fear and adrenaline combined to propel him back to his knees, gun up.
A pine bough shuddered to his left, and Joe fired.
Pop-pop-pop-pop.
Through the ringing in his ears, he thought he heard someone cry out.
“Caleb,” Camish cried, “you hit?”
Caleb’s response was an inhuman moan ending in a roar, the sound of someone trying to shout through a mouthful of liquid.
Then Joe swung the Glock a hundred and eighty degrees to his right. The forest was silent, but he anticipated Camish to be at roughly the same angle and distance as his brother, since they’d entered the trees at the same time and with the same determination.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
No cries, no sounds. And it was silent again to the left.
Maybe he’d backed them off. Caleb was wounded, maybe fatally. Camish? Who knew?
A dry branch snapped to the left, and Joe wheeled and fired off three wild shots. Another snapped to the right and he pointed and started to pull the trigger out of malevolence and fear when he quickly lowered the Glock and cursed himself.
“Not many shots left, by my count,” Caleb said clearly from the shadows. “Since your spare magazines were in those panniers, you may be out of luck.”
The slide on the Glock hadn’t kicked fully back, which meant he had at least one round left. He tried to count back, to figure out how many live rounds he still had, but he couldn’t concentrate. At least two rounds left, he hoped. He’d need that many. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, making it hard to hear or think. He thought, The brothers were formidable before. Now that at least one of them was wounded.
Lurching from tree to tree, blood flowing freely again from the wounds in his right thigh, Joe crashed through the timber back toward where he’d left Buddy.
The Grim Brothers couldn’t be far behind.
He’d find his horse, apologize, and spur him on. Push the horse down the mountain. Eventually, he’d hit water. He’d follow the stream to something, or somebody.
Buddy weighed a thousand pounds and had nine gallons of blood. Joe weighed 175 pounds and had six quarts of blood. He didn’t know how much he or his horse had left.
6
An hour past sundown, Buddy collapsed onto his front knees with his back legs locked and his butt still in the air. Joe slid off, and as soon as his boots hit the ground he was reminded sharply of the pain in his own legs, because they couldn’t hold him up. He reached out for a tree trunk to steady himself, missed, and fell in a heap next to his horse.
Buddy sighed and settled gently over to his side, and all four of his hooves windmilled for a moment before he relaxed and settled down to the occasional muscle twitch, as if he were bothered by flies.
Joe was heartbroken, but he did his best not to cry out. He crawled over to Buddy and stroked the neck of his gelding and cursed the Grim Brothers because they’d made it impossible for him to tend to his horse, to stop the bleeding. Now it was too late. And he knew that possibly, possibly, he could have saved his horse by leading him and not mounting up, that without Joe’s weight and direction Buddy could have walked slowly and cautiously and maybe the blood would have stopped flowing out.
Buddy blinked at Joe and worked his mouth like a camel. He needed water, or thought he needed water. But it wouldn’t help.
“I’m sorry,” Joe said, reaching back for his weapon. “I’m sorry for being selfish.”
Two rounds left. Buddy deserved to go quickly. Joe pressed the muzzle against Buddy’s head, said a prayer, and started to squeeze the trigger.
He thought better of it and holstered the Glock. The shot could be heard and give away his location. Plus, he might need both bullets. So he unsheathed his Buck knife.
He said another prayer. Asked both God and Marybeth to forgive him for what he was about to do.
Using a stiff broken branch with a Y in the top of it as a crutch, Joe continued down the mountain in the dark. A spring burbled out from a pile of flat rocks, and the water flowed freely and seemed to pick up volume. He kept the little creek to his right. The stream tinkled at times like wind chimes, he thought. It was a nice sound, and reassuring to know there was fresh water to drink, but he had to keep reminding himself not to get too close because the rush of water could drown out the sound of anyone coming up behind him. He followed the spring creek until it joined a larger stream, which he guessed was No Name Creek.
The moon was up and full, as were the bold white paintbrush strokes of the stars, and there was enough light on the forest floor to see because the pine needles soaked up the light and held it like powder-blue carpet. The stillness of the night, the constant pain of his legs, the awkward rhythm of his descent, and the soft backbeat percussion of his own breath was an all-encompassing world of its own and nearly made him forget about the danger he was in. It lulled him. He was jolted back into the present when a covey of blue grouse flushed from tall brush,
and the heavy beating of their wings lifting off through the boughs nearly made his heart stop.
For the next hour, his life became as simple as it had ever been because it was reduced to absolute essentials: Place one foot before the other, keep weight off that right leg, keep going, keep senses dialed to high.
He thought about home, and his vision was vivid. It was as if his brain and soul had left the damaged container and floated up through the trees, raced three hundred and eighteen miles to Saddlestring, and entered his house by slipping under the front door, where he floated to the ceiling and hovered there.
Sheridan was at the kitchen table filling out application forms for college. Lucy was in the living room watching television, painting her nails, and glancing down periodically to check for text messages on the new cell phone on her lap. Their dog Tube, a Lab-and-corgi cross, slept curled at her feet. Marybeth put dirty dinner dishes into the dishwasher and scraped what remained of the spaghetti into a plastic container for the refrigerator.
Sheridan was speaking to Marybeth, but Joe couldn’t actually hear the words, even though he knew what they were. He felt privileged to eavesdrop.
But what if they accept me? It could happen, you know.
It’s not that, honey. I know it’s possible because of your grades. But unless financial aid comes with it, there’s no way we can send you there. It’s completely on the other side of the country!
I could handle it. I’m tougher than you think.
It’s not that. You’re the toughest kid I know. I’m not sure I’m tough enough to have you gone that far away. What’s wrong with a community college at first? The first two years are the same no matter where you go.
Didn’t you go East?
That was different. Your grandmother insisted and I needed to get away. I came back for grad school, though. That’s where I met your dad.
So it was okay for you, but it isn’t for me? Thanks for the ego boost, Mom. I really appreciate it.
