by C. J. Box
McCue said, “He’s got a point.”
The red-haired man disagreed, said, “Mr. McCue, we have all the men and equipment we need. Taking along another guy will slow us down.”
McCue waved him off. “That sheriff over in Baggs had more men and more equipment, and they didn’t find them. Maybe having someone along who knows the mountains will help. Equipment fails sometimes.”
The red-haired man was obviously in no position to argue with McCue. But he was unhappy. He pointed to Farkus. “You can come along as long as you’re actually useful. But you need to keep your mouth shut otherwise. And when you turn into dead weight. ”
“I’m dead meat,” Farkus finished his sentence for him. “I understand.” He took his hands off the hood.
Farkus had no idea what was going on or what these men were after. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was getting through the next ten minutes before McCue changed his mind.
He pointed toward a fat sorrel without a saddle. He said, “So, is that my horse?”
14
Joe said to Marybeth, “I chanted your name for two straight days. It helped me to keep going.”
It was nearly midnight. Sheridan, Lucy, and April were back in the motel. Marybeth had come to say goodnight before she left to join them. She looked at Joe with sympathy and curiosity.
“And I’m so sorry about your horses,” he said.
“After the girls are gone, all I’ll have are my horses,” she said. “But you seem determined to kill them all off.”
He winced.
“I’m sort of kidding,” she said.
He squeezed her hand. “We’ll get more horses. I know you’re always on the lookout for good ones.”
“In fact,” she said with a sly smile, “there are a couple of fine little quarter horses down on this ranch in Colorado between Boulder and Longmont. ”
He asked, “How is my dad? Have you heard?”
“He’s failing fast.”
“Have you talked to his doctors?”
She nodded.
“Any hope?”
She shook her head.
After years of estrangement, Joe had become reacquainted with his father, George, on a case three years before, when he’d been assigned to Yellowstone Park by Governor Rulon. Days after they’d made contact, George had been severely beaten, because he’d made the mistake of holing up in Joe’s room and men who’d come after Joe had found George instead. He’d never fully recovered and had been in a senior care facility in Billings since. Joe and Marybeth had paid for George’s care with money they didn’t have. In addition to the injuries he’d sustained, George had dementia and his body was rotted by alcoholism.
“Maybe I can see him,” Joe said. “He’s here somewhere in this hospital, right?”
“Yes. But I don’t know if that’s a great idea right now in your condition-or his,” she said.
“Still,” he said.
“You chanted my name?” she said, changing the subject.
“It was my mantra. You and the girls. I said your names over and over again to myself. Like this: ‘Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April.’ ”
“I’m touched,” she said, but he knew from her furrowed brow she was holding something back.
“What?” he asked.
“Joe, I’ve got to ask you, is something wrong? You seem different somehow. I’m more than a little worried about you.”
“In what way?”
She rose, took his right hand, and squeezed it with both of hers. “This thing you went through with those brothers. It seems to have affected you very deeply. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She breathed deeply and looked longingly into his eyes. “Not really,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
Said Marybeth, “The girls noticed it. They asked me if you were going to be all right. Sheridan especially said she thought there was something different about you.”
He waved it off. “Look, I’m hurting. I have holes all over me. I’ve been through quite an experience and I’m trying to sort it all out. I hate it that my daughters-and you-are saying these things.”
“Is it because they hurt you, those brothers?”
“I’ve been hurt before.”
“Then what?” Marybeth kneaded his hand and pursed her lips.
Finally, he said, “I guess I feel like I left a piece of me up there on that mountain. I don’t feel completely whole.”
“You’ll heal up.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
Joe shook his head. “I’m still sorting it out. I feel like I missed something obvious. Something right in front of my eyes. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it was. I feel like I asked them all the wrong questions, and I couldn’t see what was in front of my eyes. Not that I can see it now, either. But those brothers-they beat me at every turn. They were faster, smarter, and meaner. I was outgunned and outmuscled.”
Marybeth frowned at him. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. Plus it doesn’t help that McLanahan and the sheriff in Baggs think I made it all up.”
“McLanahan’s an idiot.”
“There was a DCI agent here today,” Joe said. “Or someone claiming to be a DCI agent. He asked some pretty strange questions, and I felt he was trying to trip me up for some reason. And no one seems to have ever heard of this guy before.”
“That’s odd,” she said.
“To be honest, I heard some doubt in the governor’s voice, too.”
“Joe,” she said, “Rulon’s a lot of things, but he’s still a politician.”
He shrugged and winced.
“What did my mother say to you today? When the two of you were alone?”
Joe sighed. “She said it was time I put away childish things. Like my job.”
Marybeth’s eyes flared. “I knew it. I just knew she’d use this opportunity to try and get under your skin.”
Joe said, “I’m wondering if she wasn’t right.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why do you listen to her? I don’t.”
He tried to shrug, but his right shoulder screamed at him. “Ow,” he moaned.
“Don’t do that. Are you in pain? Do you want me to call a nurse?”
He shook his head no.
“Joe,” she said. “You’re tired. You need some sleep. We can talk about all of this tomorrow.”
He said, “How are we affording the motel? How much are you paying per night?”
“Don’t worry about that. We can afford it.”
“But. ”
“I said not to worry about it, Joe,” she said with authority. “You need to rest and not worry about things. You’ll be back at home in no time, rested and healed.”
He nodded. “Yup.” He told her about being placed on administrative leave.
“And pay no attention to my mother. I can guess what she said because I know her. Joe-” Marybeth released his hand and brushed her fingers across his lips. “You are the man I married. I knew what I was signing on for. I’ve never been resentful or angry with what you do for a living, and I know you’re not the kind of man who could give that up. You do what you do because you’re hardwired for it. You get yourself into situations because you have a certain set of standards that are simply beyond her. So pay no attention to her. She’s crazy and without scruples. She doesn’t understand me, or us. So just put her out of your mind. I thought you’d done that years ago.”
“I thought I had, too,” he said. “But she got to me because I was thinking along the same lines.”
“Only because you’re in a hospital bed and you’re confused by what McLanahan told you,” Marybeth said. “You’ll think differently when you’re recovered.”
“I hope so.”
She paused. Then: “I hope you don’t think you need to go back up there after them. The sheriff down in Baggs will catch them. They’ll eventually find them and bring them to justi
ce. You don’t have to make this a personal quest.”
He nodded, but he didn’t mean it.
She kissed him goodnight and ignored the nurse filling the doorway and looking at her watch as a means of advising them visiting hours were over.
Before she left the room, he said, “Thank you for what you said.”
She smiled painfully and said she’d be back in the morning.
At 3:15 A.M., Joe slid his legs out from under the blankets and eased out of the bed. His leg wounds were tightly bound, but the movement caused sharp needle-like pains that zapped up into his abdomen and belly. He paused at the doorway to get his breath back and pulled on a pair of boxers so his buttocks weren’t bare out of the back of the duck-covered cotton gown.
The hallway was quiet and dimly lit. The nurse station was to his right, so he padded left in his open-backed hospital slippers. Hugging the wall so he couldn’t be seen by the night nurse, he slid along the slick block wall to the end of the hallway and the elevators. Two floors up was ICU.
George Pickett was in room 621. Joe paused before going in and tried to gather strength and resolve. He had no idea what he would find inside.
He eased into the room and stood with his back to the wall near the door, out of sight in case a nurse or aide walked by and glanced in.
Dim blue-white neon lights lit George on his bed. Dozens of tubes curled up and away from his body into the gloom. Bags of clear liquid hung over him. It was as if his father were a long-forgotten potato gone to root in a dark pantry.
Joe shuffled closer. His father looked like a skeleton wrapped in loose latex, as if his yellow skin could slough off of the bones into a pile on the linoleum if he were jostled. Joe froze in mid-breath when George’s eyes shot open and his father’s head turned on his pillow toward him.
“Dad?”
George said, “What I could really use right now, son, is a drink.” His voice was reedy and dry.
“Hello, Dad. How are you doing?”
“Give me a drink.”
Joe reached out for the water bottle on the tray table and his father’s face folded in on itself in a grotesque scowl. “Not that! I said I wanted a drink!”
“Ah,” Joe said.
His father’s rheumy eyes looked at something above and to the left of Joe, but the scowl remained.
“I can’t,” Joe said.
“Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Joe.”
“Joe? I had a son named Joe.”
“That’s me,” he said, feeling his heart break.
“You’re my son, but you won’t give me a drink?” George rasped. “Then what the hell good are you?”
And with that, he died.
Joe heard an alarm burr at the nurse station, and he stepped back and aside as an emergency team rushed into the room and surrounded George’s body, which seemed to have deflated even more. Despite the chatter of the attendants, he could hear the pneumatic cack-cack-cack of his father’s death rattle, and he couldn’t shake the thought that his dad was getting in one last laugh.
15
Dave Farkus had spent most of his adult life working hard to avoid hard work. His philosophy was to save himself for pursuits he favored-hunting, fishing, poker, snowmobiling, mountain man rendezvous reenactments, and blasting through the mountains on his 4 x 4 ATV.
Avoiding hard work required discipline and a complete awareness of his surroundings, as well as an intuitive sense of when to be in the wrong place when extra time or effort was demanded. Like golf or fly-fishing, it was a lifelong pursuit that he knew he might never perfect but he could certainly continue to improve. When his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Ardith, suggested bitterly he consider writing a pamphlet on the techniques he employed to maintain his lifestyle, Farkus told her it would be too much work.
Before everyone had been laid off from the natural-gas pipeline company, he’d been supremely skillful at the art of slipping into the men’s room or taking a break moments before the shift supervisor entered the shop to outline new assignments or ask for volunteers for a big new job. When dirty and grueling tasks were demanded, like sandblasting old valves or replacing blown motors in pump units, Farkus expertly anticipated when the jobs would have to take place, due to his intimate knowledge of the industry and workplace, and would schedule a dentist appointment or mandatory drug test for that day.
It was easier to game the system in his new job working for the county. Bureaucracy was made for shirking, and he felt kind of stupid it had taken so many years to settle into his true calling. Today, for example, he’d gotten a tip that all the bus drivers would have to go into the garage and assist a contract cleaning crew on a top-to-bottom scrubbing of the vehicles. Which is why he’d taken a personal day to go over the mountains to try to spot-weld his marriage back together instead.
Dave Farkus always figured there would be high-intensity brown-noses who would take on the tough jobs and want to be heroes. He let them. Part of his philosophy was that it was as important to have slackers as to have go-getters within every work crew. For balance.
Additionally, in the thirty years since he’d graduated from high school (barely), he’d made it a point to avoid anything to do with horses, like ranch work. Horses were unpredictable, prone to break down, and involved after-hours maintenance. So after three hours of riding up into the timber nose-to-tail with the four men and their horses, he said, “So, if we find whatever it is you’re looking for, will you let me go home?”
Which made the red-haired rider in black, named M. Whitney Parnell, according to the nametag on his rifle scabbard, snort and exchange looks with Smith. Farkus gathered from observation that Parnell was in charge of the whole operation. Smith, and the two camo-clad men, the tall thin one with the nose named Campbell and the blond man named Capellen, were subservient to Parnell.
Parnell rode out ahead, followed by Smith. It was necessary to ride single-file because the trail was narrow and trees hemmed in both sides. Farkus rode a fat sorrel horse in the middle. Behind him were Campbell, Capellen, and the two packhorses.
“You see,” Farkus explained, “I’m just thinking my role here is to help you out because I know these mountains and you don’t, but if in the end you’re not going to let me go, well, you know what I’m saying. Where’s my motivation, you know?”
This time, Smith snorted derisively and touched the butt of his rifle. “Here’s your motivation.”
Farkus craned around in his saddle to see if the riders behind him were more sympathetic. Campbell simply glared at him, his face a mask of contempt. Capellen, though, looked miserable. His face was bone-china white and his eyes were rimmed with red. He clutched the saddle horn with both hands as if to remain mounted.
“Capellen looks bad,” Farkus said.
“He’s just fine,” Campbell said through gritted teeth. “Turn around.”
“He looks sick or injured to me,” Farkus said. It was obvious Campbell and Capellen stuck together, just as Parnell and Smith were a team. What had brought them all together besides McCue? he wondered.
“Besides,” Farkus said, turning back around, “shouldn’t you let me know what we’re after? I can’t help guide if I don’t know what we’re hunting for.”
What Farkus didn’t tell them was that he had no idea where they were.
Parnell said, “We’ll tell you what you need to know when you need to know it and not before. I should have been more explicit and said if you came with us that you’d need to keep your mouth shut and stay out of the way. I didn’t figure it was necessary at the time because we have the guns and gear and all you’ve got is that stupid expression on your face. I guess I thought the additional conditions would be obvious and implied.”
Farkus grunted. Said, “You can’t blame a guy for wondering about his fate.”
“Dave,” Parnell said, not even turning in the saddle, “you’re a loser from Bumfuck, Wyoming. You have no fate. So shut up.”
“Yeah,” Smith echoed. “
Shut up, Dave.”
From behind him, Campbell said, “If you keep yapping, I’m going to put a bullet into your head.”
Farkus looked over his shoulder, grinning uncomfortably, hoping for a hint that Campbell was kidding, that he was chiding him with insults the way men do with each other.
Instead, Campbell reached down and patted the butt of his AR-15 and mouthed, “Bang.”
They continued climbing. Farkus recognized a couple of the mountain parks from previous elk hunts, but he knew if they kept riding west, he’d soon run out of country with which he was familiar. The fact was that Farkus had always hunted with the same philosophy he used at work. He was happy to let his buddies pore over maps and determine where they’d hunt and develop the strategy for the day. Farkus would just go along. He’d never actually guided hunters in these mountains, as he’d let on earlier. Rather, he’d always volunteered to be the man behind the log looking out on a meadow while his buddies walked the timber to spook out the animals. Just as he’d always take on the role of holding the leg of the elk that was being field-dressed so he wouldn’t have to get down into the gore.
He didn’t dare let on that while he’d found Cottonwood Creek once, he’d thought it was Elkhair Creek and his buddies had come and found him before he spent the night lost. Or that the location of Bandit Creek was a complete mystery to him.
And at the clipped pace they were riding, they’d be near the summit by nightfall. He’d never been to the summit of the mountains before. His butt hurt and his knees ached from bending them unnaturally around the belly of his sorrel so his boots would fit into the stirrups. He was hungry and the beer buzz he had going earlier was being replaced by a dull headache. The fat sorrel labored more than the other horses, probably the reason they’d held her in reserve.
The slow realization came over him that he’d likely not see his pickup or Ardith or the Dixon Club or another twelve-pack of Keystone Light ever again. This foray into the Sierra Madre might cost him everything.
