by C. J. Box
“They’re probably fetching Rulon’s dinner,” Nate grumbled. “Maybe giving him a nice foot massage.”
“What was that?” Baird asked Joe.
“Nothing important,” Joe said, glaring at his friend.
“Sheriff, can you see the license plates on the pickup and horse trailer at all?”
“Not real well,” Baird said. “I can barely make one of them out through the trees. I can’t see the numbers clearly, though.”
Joe asked, “Is the plate blue?”
“Yes.”
“I’d bet you a dollar it’s a Michigan plate.”
“That sounds right.”
“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Joe said.
“Who is we?” Baird asked.
“Yeah, who is we?” Nate asked as well.
“Keep in radio contact,” Joe told Baird. “And back out of there if you see those guys again. Seriously. You don’t want to take them on without help.”
Joe was under no illusion the sheriff would believe him and re treat.
A half hour later, Joe’s radio crackled to life.
“Joe, you there?” Baird asked. Joe noted the urgency of Baird’s tone and his complete absence of radio protocol.
“Yes, sheriff, what is it?” He felt icy fingers pull back on his scalp.
“Jesus!” Baird said, and the transmission went to static.
Joe’s pickup was in a steady climb into the mountains, struggling with the weight of the horse trailer full of horses behind it. When the animals shifted their weight around, Joe could feel the trailer shift and pull back at his truck. His motor was strained and the tachometer edged into the red. He floored it. While he did so, he tried to raise the dispatcher who’d originally connected them.
When she came on she was weeping. “Did you hear the sheriff?” she asked. “I think those bastards got him.”
“I heard,” Joe said. “But let’s not speculate on what we don’t know. Time to sit up and be a professional. Are you dispatching EMTs? Anybody?”
The dispatcher sniffed. “Everybody,” she said. “But you’re the closest to him by far. I hope you can help him. I hope they didn’t. ”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Hey-you don’t need to talk about him that way yet. He may be okay.”
“Okay,” she said, to placate Joe.
A few minutes later, Nate said, “Wonder what’ll be left of him.”
27
The lack of wind was rare and remarkable, Joe thought, and the single thin plume of black smoke miles away deep in the timber rose straight up as if on a line until it finally dissipated at around 15,000 feet.
Joe and Nate had just summited the mountains, and the eastern slope was laid out before them in a sea of green between the ranges. The vista was stunning: a massive, undulating carpet veined with tendrils of gold and red. The thread of black smoke seemed to tenuously connect the mountains with the sky.
“It’s like whoever set the fire said, Look at me,” Nate said as they plunged down the other side of the mountain in the pickup. “I’m wondering if they wish they hadn’t set a fire now. Or if they’re trying to draw us in.”
“Black smoke like that isn’t from a forest fire,” Joe said.
“Nope.”
“Smoke that black usually means rubber is burning,” Joe said.
“Do you know how to get there?” Nate asked.
Joe nodded. “There are quite a few old logging roads ahead. I’ve been on a few of them. It’s been so dry, though, we should be able to find Baird’s tire tracks and follow him in.”
Nate surveyed the vista in front of him as Joe eased forward. “Rough country,” he said.
“In every way,” Joe said.
There was only one open road that went to the southeast toward the smoke, and there were fresh tire tracks imprinted over a coating of dust. Joe made the turn and drove down the two-track as swiftly as he could over the washboarded surface without shaking the pickup apart. Nate hung out the passenger window like a Labrador, Joe thought, with his hand clamped on his hat.
“This looks like the right road,” Nate said, pulling himself back in. “We need to be ready.”
Joe nodded. Afternoon sun fanned through the lodgepole pines as he shot along the dirt road. In his peripheral vision, he saw Nate dig his weapon and holster out from under the bench seat and strap it back on.
“You loaded?” Nate asked, pulling Joe’s new shotgun out from behind the seat and zipping off the gun cover.
“Shells in the glove box,” Joe said.
Nate, who was never unloaded, sighed and found the shells and fitted them into the receiver.
“I have mixed feelings about this thing we are about to do,” Nate said.
“I know.”
“You do, too.”
Joe grunted. “If it weren’t for Diane, I might be tempted to turn around.”
“But we can’t let feelings get in the way,” Nate said, putting the shotgun muzzle-down on the floor and shoving the stock between the bench seats so it wouldn’t rattle around on the dirt road. “We’ve set our course. It doesn’t matter what we think about politics or the law or anything else. It’s not Speed kills, it’s Hesitation kills. If we find those brothers and you’ve got a shot, take it. These boys aren’t going to let us lead them back to jail. They’ve left all that behind, I’m afraid. Don’t start talking or reading them their rights or trying to figure out where the hell they went off the rails. Just shoot.”
When Joe started to object, Nate said, “It isn’t about who is the fastest or the toughest hombre in the state. It’s never about those things. It’s about who can look up without any mist in their eyes or doubts in their heart, aim, and pull the trigger without thinking twice. It’s about killing. It’s always been that way.”
Sheriff Ron Baird’s county Ford Excursion was parked twenty feet off the two-track in a grove of aspen trees that overlooked the campground below in the distance. It wasn’t burning, but it had been worked over.
Joe pulled up beside it and jumped out of his pickup with his shotgun. He circled the Excursion. The hood was open and all visible wires had been sliced in half or pulled out and thrown to the ground like angel-hair packing from a shipping crate. The front windshield was smashed inward and cubes of safety glass sparkled like sheets of jewelry on the front bench seat, with errant cubes of it on the hood. The tires were flat and air had stopped seeping out from the open wounds in the sidewalls.
Baird was nowhere to be found.
Nate had opened the passenger door and stood outside the truck on the running board. Using both hands, he tracked through the air how he guessed the brothers had come up from down below on each side in a pincer movement converging on Baird’s vehicle.
Joe said, “I wonder where they took him.”
“They marched him down the hill,” Nate said, binoculars at his eyes. “I see him.”
Joe felt a spasm of fear shoot through him. “Is he alive?”
“I think so. But he doesn’t look real good.”
“How so?” Joe asked.
“Looks like he’s got an arrow sticking out of his ass.”
The stench from burning fuel, tires, and plastic was nearly overwhelming on the valley floor. The pickup that towed the horse trailer, the trailer itself, and Dave Farkus’s pickup was on fire. Baird was fifty yards off to the side of the camp, and he appeared to be hugging the trunk of a tree.
“Do you see any sign of the brothers?” Joe asked as they drove down the hill toward the scene. He’d shifted to four-wheel drive because of the incline, and he let the compression of the motor hold back his truck and trailer.
Nate lowered the binoculars. “Nope.”
“Think they’re gone or using the sheriff to draw us in and ambush us?” Joe had used the same tactic two years before when he’d bound a wanted man to lure in his would-be assassin. It had been one of the most shameful decisions he’d ever made, even though he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t do it again, giv
en the circumstances.
“If we get sucked in and ambushed using the same trap,” Joe said, “it’s not poetic justice, but it’s something like it.”
Nate shook his head. “My guess is those boys are running back into the mountains. They probably came down to disable the vehicles and didn’t expect to get surprised by the sheriff.”
“Or us,” Joe said.
Nate said, “And I bet they’re wondering why they picked the only day in Wyoming history without wind to start a couple of cars on fire. Normally, we might not even see the smoke.”
Joe drove to Baird and hit the brakes and leaped out. He could feel the heat from the burning pickup on his back.
Baird was conscious, his eyes wide open, his mustache twitching. He was hugging the tree because they’d cinched Flex-Cuffs around his wrists on the other side of the trunk. And, as Nate had mentioned, there was an arrow shaft sticking out of his left buttock. Joe recognized the craftsmanship of the arrow and knew it had been made by the Grim Brothers. He could see the rawhide where the shaft was bound to the point next to the Wrangler label on Baird’s jeans. The arrow wasn’t deep at all, although Joe guessed it probably hurt.
“Sheriff,” Joe said, “you’ve got an arrow sticking out of your butt.”
“Why, thanks, Joe. I was wondering what it was bothering me back there.”
“You want me to pull it out or cut you down first?”
“Cut me down, please.”
As Joe removed his Leatherman tool and opened the blade, he said, “How far are the brothers ahead of us?”
Baird nodded toward the forested slope on the other side of the burning pickups. “Maybe thirty minutes,” he said.
“They on foot?”
Baird nodded. “They are, but they cover ground like demons. I saw them coming out of the trees at me on both sides, but they were so fast I didn’t get a chance to fight them off.”
“I understand,” Joe said, cutting the plastic cuffs free. “I’ve tangled with them and lost, just like you.”
Baird stepped away from the tree and rubbed hard on his wrists. His Stetson had fallen off, and strands of his wispy black hair reached down from his brow to his upper lip. As he rubbed his wrists, the arrow shaft danced up and down.
“So,” Joe said, “do you believe me now?”
Baird reached up and pushed his stringy hair back. “I was waiting to see how long it took you to ask me that question.”
As the two men looked at each other, Nate strode behind Baird toward the burning vehicles in the camp. As deft as a swallow plucking a gnat from the air, Nate reached out and pulled the arrow from Baird.
“Ouch, goddammit!” Baird said, spinning around. “Who said you could do that?”
Nate smirked, handed Baird the arrow, and continued on his way.
“They had no intention of killing you,” Joe said to Baird a few minutes later, as he helped the sheriff limp to a downed log to rest on. “Or you’d be dead.”
“I know,” Baird agreed. He straddled the log and leaned over it so his chest rested against the bark. His wound was open to the sky.
“Same with me,” Joe said to the sheriff. “For whatever reason, they did some real damage, but they didn’t feel compelled to finish the job.”
“It would have been easy,” Baird said, then gestured over his shoulder toward his wound. “This thing hurts. How bad is it?”
Joe said, “This is when you find out who your friends are,” looking at the trickle of fresh blood coming out of the wound.
“Just don’t let that friend of yours near me again,” Baird said.
Joe grimaced and turned for his pickup truck to get his first-aid kit.
Joe ripped another strip of tape to bind the compress to the wound while doing his best to avoid looking at Sheriff Baird’s bare butt, which was stunningly white. As Joe applied the tape, Nate came down out of the trees.
“Did those boys say anything?” Nate asked Baird.
“Like what?”
Nate shrugged. “Anything at all? Like, Stay off our mountain, sheriff, or Damn, where’d you come from?”
Baird shook his head. “Nothing at first. It’s like they could communicate through hand signals or something. They never said a word the whole time. Until the end, I mean.”
Joe paused, said, “What did they say at the end?”
Baird cleared his throat, coughed up a ball of phlegm, and spat it away. “After they cuffed me to that tree, I expected them to just cut my throat and leave me there. One of ’em got right behind me and kind of whispered into my ear. He said, ‘The only reason we’re letting you live is so you can tell anybody who will listen to leave us the hell alone.’”
“That’s all?” Joe said.
“Pretty much. He repeated himself, though. ‘Just leave us the hell alone.’ Then he stepped back and said, ‘This is to show you how serious we are,’ and shot me in the butt with that arrow. I could tell he took it easy on me, though. He barely shot that at me with much force. I mean, he could have done all kind of damage.
“I don’t know which one it was who shot me,” Baird said. “It’s not like they introduced themselves. And you know they look and dress exactly alike. The only difference between them was one of them had a bandage taped on his face, on his chin.”
“That would be Caleb,” Joe said. “Meaning Camish was the one who talked to you and shot you with the arrow.”
Baird said, “Well, Caleb didn’t talk. I got the impression maybe he couldn’t anymore.”
“Did he look wounded any other way?” Joe asked. “Did he appear to move stiffly or hang back, anything like that?”
“Not that I noticed,” the sheriff said.
Joe shook his head. How could he shoot the man square in the chest and cause no harm?
Baird turned his head around toward Joe. “You know, I gotta tell you, I was scared at first. But when he said, ‘Just leave us the hell alone,’ I felt sorry for them in a weird way. Even though they did this to me. Ain’t that strange? Maybe it’s because I think that way myself a lot these days.”
Nate was close enough to hear Baird’s question, but he didn’t respond. To Joe, he said, “I saddled the horses. They’ve got an hour on us at best and they aren’t on horseback. This may be the closest we’ll ever get to them.”
Joe nodded and felt his scalp twitch again from fear. He tried to hide his face from Nate.
“We’d best get going,” Nate said.
“I heard you,” Joe said. He told Baird to pull up his pants.
As they rode up out of the camp where the vehicles still burned, they could hear the distant thumping of a helicopter to the east. The chopper was coming to get Baird and whisk him away to Rawlins, Laramie, or Cheyenne. Various state troopers and DCI agents were on their way as well, but hours behind them.
Baird’s handheld had been propped against the log he was resting on and the volume was up. As Joe saddled the packhorse and packed gear into the panniers, he heard the chatter pick up as word spread of the ambush of Baird. Sheriff’s departments from four Wyoming counties and two Colorado counties were mobilizing. DCI, FBI, and ATF were being contacted. There was even speculation about contacting the governor’s office to request the National Guard.
Joe said to Nate, “By this time tomorrow, this camp will be a small city.”
Nate said, “I’m not a city-type guy.”
They rode their horses up into the mountains. Joe led, followed by Nate and the packhorse.
The feeling of dread seemed to increase in direct proportion to the altitude, Joe thought. The sharp smell of pine and sweating horses, the gritty taste of dust from the trail, the beating of his heart as the air got thinner-it was as if he’d never been away. For the third time in an hour, Joe reached out and touched the butt plate of his shotgun with the tips of his fingers, as if assuring himself it was there.
Apparently, Nate saw him do it, said, “Remember what I said.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
“So we’re agreed that the best way to do this is to drive hard on our own, right?” Nate said. “We’re going to try to catch up with those boys while they’re within striking distance? And we aren’t going to give a good goddamn about all of the drummers on their way here right now?”
“Yup.”
Nate said, “Okay, then.”
Joe said, “I feel like we owe it to those brothers to find them before they’re cornered by the cavalry that’ll be coming.”
“Even though the result may be the same,” Nate said.
28
They followed the tracks of the horses that had been there before them into the mountains. Joe determined that the men from Michigan had six horses. What he couldn’t tell was if that meant there were six men total or if at least a couple of the animals were packhorses. The horses they were following had been recently shod, based on the sharp edges of the imprints in the dust and mud.
But who were they, these men? And how did Dave Farkus get hooked up with them? Joe’s best guess was Farkus stumbled on the men and was taken along-or disposed of along the way. The purpose of the riders was unclear as well, although Joe was pummeled with the many connections to Michigan and the Upper Peninsula that kept cropping up. Were these riders after the brothers? Or allies with them?
Joe and Nate quickly fell into a procedure where if they wanted or needed to talk, they would sidle next to each other on horseback so they could lean into each other and keep their voices down. Joe sidestepped his horse off the trail and let Nate catch up and rein to stop.
Joe said, “What do you think happened to the boys from Michigan?”
Nate narrowed his eyes while looking ahead of them up the mountain. “All I know is that they haven’t come back down the trail to their vehicles. That says they’re still up here. Or that they aren’t ever coming down.”
“I’d opt for the latter,” Joe said, leaning on the pommel and looking ahead.
“I’m trying to figure out why the brothers went after their vehicles,” Nate said. “It seems kind of pointless to expose themselves that way.”
