by C. J. Box
Chris Urman was in custody in the sheriff’s department, but Joe expected him to be released quickly. Joe told Deputy Reed that Urman had simply defended himself, firing only after being surprised by Lothar and being fired upon. Joe knew Urman felt horrible about what had happened, and had dismissed any suspicion he may have had of him on their trek back to the pickup to find Robey and Conway. Joe’s pickup was still on the mountain, shot up and bloodstained. He’d need to send a tow truck for it. Another year, another damaged truck.
Speer leaned over and put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Go home, Joe. Get cleaned up. Get some rest. There’s nothing you can do here.”
Joe shook his head. “I need to be here when Nancy comes. I need to apologize to her for putting Robey in that situation.”
Speer shook his head sadly, gave Joe’s shoulder a squeeze, and went back in the direction of his little morgue.
NANCY HERSIG looked frantic when she pushed through the hallway doors. Nancy had always been meticulous in her look and dress, always composed and calm, comfortable with herself. Given to jeans, sweaters, blazers, and pearls, Nancy Hersig was the queen of volunteer causes in Twelve Sleep County, heading up the United Way, the hospital foundation, the homeless shelter. But Joe saw a different Nancy coming down the hall. Her eyes were red-rimmed and looked like angry red headlights. Her makeup was smeared and the right side of her hair was wild, the result of raking it back with her fingers on the drive from Casper to Saddlestring.
Joe stood up and she came to him, letting him hold her. She began to weep in hard, racking sobs that had to hurt, he thought.
“I thought I was cried out,” she said, her teeth chattering as she took a breath, “but I guess I’m not.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“What have you heard, Joe?”
“He’s in surgery,” he said, hoping a doctor would burst through the doors at exactly that moment with good news.
“What did the doctors say?”
Joe sighed. “That he’s hurt real bad, Nancy.”
“He’s tough,” she said, “he’s always been tough. He used to rodeo, you know.”
“I know.”
“I wish I could see him and talk him through this.”
Joe didn’t know what to say, and simply held her. She regained her composure and gently pushed herself away, dabbing at her face with her sleeve. “God, I’m a mess,” she said, her eyes sweeping across his face and lingering on the splotches of dried blood on his Wranglers.
“Is that Robey’s?” she asked, pointing.
“We did all we could to stop the bleeding,” Joe said, “but . . .”
She nodded and held up a hand, as if to say, Don’t tell me.
“Nancy,” Joe said, struggling to find the right words, “I’m just so damned sorry this happened. It didn’t have to. I never should have left him last night. I called for backup but it didn’t get there in time.”
Again, she shook her head. Don’t tell me.
“I hate not being able to do something,” he said, fighting back a surprising urge to cry.
“Oh, you can do something,” she said, suddenly defiant. “You can find the man who did this and put him down like a dog.”
The vehemence in her words took him aback.
He said, “I will, Nancy. I’ll find him.”
“And put him down,” she repeated.
“And put him down,” he said.
She turned on her heel away from Joe and wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now, Joe. I don’t know whether to go get our kids and bring them here, or pray, or what. Maybe I should bust through those doors so I can see him.
“Joe,” she said, looking over her shoulder, “there’s no manual for this.”
They both jumped when the ICU doors clicked open.
And they knew instantly from the look on the surgeon’s face what had happened inside.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, shaking his head.
Nancy didn’t shriek, didn’t wail. She stood immobile, stunned, as if she’d been slapped. Joe took a step toward her and she shook her head.
“I’ll contact our grief counselor,” the surgeon said in a mumble, his eyes fixed on the top of his shoes. “We did all we—”
“I’m sure you did,” she said, cutting him off. “And there’s no need for a counselor. I just want to see him. Let me see him.”
The surgeon said, “Mrs. Hersig, I don’t think—”
“I said, let me see him,” she said with force.
The surgeon sighed and stepped aside, holding the ICU door open for her. As she passed, she reached out and squeezed Joe’s hand.
“Maybe Marybeth could give me a call later,” she said with a wan smile, “if she doesn’t mind. I might need some help with the kids and arrangements. I’m not even sure what I’ll need help with.”
“She’ll be there,” Joe said.
“And remember what you promised me,” she said.
“I do,” he said, struck by the words—the same words and solemn tone he’d used for his wedding vow.
Nancy Hersig paused at the open door, took a deep breath, threw back her shoulders, patted her hair down, and strode purposefully into the ICU.
The surgeon looked at Joe, said, “Tough lady.”
Joe nodded his agreement and dumbly withdrew his phone to call Marybeth.
“I FIGURED I’d find you here,” Randy Pope said hotly, appearing at the other end of the hallway at the same time the ICU doors closed. “Finally checking your messages, I see. I’ve been calling you all morning, and so has the governor.”
Joe held up a hand. “Give me a minute. I have a call to make.”
“Joe, damn you, have you heard what’s happened?”
“I said I need to make a call.”
Pope quickly closed the distance between them.
“The governor’s got his plane in the air to pick us up as we speak,” Pope said. “He wants us in his office right away, and he means right away. He’s furious about what happened out there last night, and so am I. We look like a bunch of incompetents.”
Joe took a deep breath and leaned back from Pope, who was standing toe-to-toe, his face a mask of indignation.
“Give me a minute—”
“We don’t have a minute.”
“Randy,” Joe said, speaking as calmly as possible, “Robey Hersig didn’t make it. My friend is dead. I need to get in touch with Marybeth so she can come here and help out Nancy.”
“Joe . . .” Pope said, reaching for Joe’s phone to take it away from him. As Joe turned his head, Pope’s knuckles grazed Joe’s cheek.
Something red and hot popped in the back of Joe’s head and he tossed the phone aside and backed Pope against the wall, squeezing his throat. The director’s eyes bulged and his nose flared and he clawed at Joe’s hands. Joe realized he was snarling.
Pope made a gargling sound and tried to pry Joe’s hands away. Then his boss kicked Joe in the shin, so hard electric shocks shot through his body, and Joe realized what he was doing and let go and stepped back, as surprised at his behavior as Pope was.
“Don’t touch me,” Joe said.
Pope made the gargling sound again while doubling over, one hand at his throat, the other held up as if to ward off another attack.
“My God,” Pope barked, “you tried to kill me! My own subordinate tried to kill me!”
“Your subordinate has a call to make,” Joe said, retrieving his phone and fighting the urge to do it again.
AS HE SAT in the backseat of Deputy Reed’s cruiser—Reed had been waiting outside the hospital to give them a ride to Saddlestring Airport to meet the governor’s plane—Joe said to Pope, “How’s your neck?”
Pope was in the front seat, next to Reed. He kept hacking and rubbing his throat. “I just hope there isn’t permanent damage,” Pope said, his voice huskier than usual.
“Go ahead and press charges,” Joe said. “Have me arrested. Take
me officially off this case and then try to explain that to the governor.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Pope croaked. “If it was up to me—”
“But it is up to you,” Joe said, thinking if Pope fired him again he’d have the freedom to pursue the killer on his own, without official sanction. He had a promise to keep, and being relieved of the bureaucracy might unleash him to keep it.
Pope turned stiffly in the seat, glaring at Joe. “The governor wants to see both of us. He’s not happy. It would only be a little too convenient for you if you didn’t show up, now wouldn’t it?”
Joe shook his head. “The thought hadn’t occurred to me.”
“I’ll bet.”
Joe shrugged.
“Look,” Pope said, baring his teeth, “if I had my way you would never have gotten your job back with my agency. You’d still be a ranch hand, or whatever the hell you were a year ago. We can’t have cowboys like you out in the field anymore, not in this day and age. Just look at last night if you want evidence of what happens when you go off half-cocked. But I need you on this one, and I hate to say it. I really hate to say it. We need to find that shooter, and we need to do it fast. I need everybody I can get, even you. Especially you,” Pope said with distaste, “since you know the area.”
Joe looked away.
“But when this is all over,” Pope said, “you’re going to pay for what you did to me back there.”
He turned around with a huff.
Joe and Deputy Reed exchanged glances in the rearview mirror, and Reed rolled his eyes, as if to say, Bosses . . .
REED HAD to slow his cruiser in front of the county building on Main Street because of the small demonstration taking place. Cable news satellite trucks partially blocked the street, and cameramen pushed through the crowd photographing the crowd.
As they skirted the gathering, Joe could see Klamath Moore on the courthouse steps, his arms raised, leading the group of thirty-five to forty followers in a shouted hymn:
All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all.
“And to think,” Reed said, “I used to like that song.”
Pope snorted his disgust at the protest. “Look, there’s nearly as many cameras as there are protesters. Where are the reporters covering murdered hunters? That’s what I’d like to know.”
Joe said nothing, but he surveyed the protesters as they passed by. Several he recognized from the airport. There was a group of four men who looked more like hunters than anti-hunters, Joe thought. The men were tall, burly, with cowboy hats and beards. Two of them—one angular with haunting dark eyes and the other beefy with a scarred face and an eye patch—glared back at him with hostility.
Off to the side of Klamath Moore, up on the steps, was the Native woman and her baby he had noted at the airport.
Many of the men looked hard, their faces contorted with grim passion as they sang. They were the faces of true believers, of the obsessed. He turned in the backseat to look at them out the rear window.
He wondered which of them was the shooter.
I sing,
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And order’d their estate.
And the words and melody, as always, seem to fill my sails, fill my soul, bringing me both relief and validation. But God, I am exhausted. I need rest. I can’t remember ever going so long without sleep. There are hallucinations at the edge of my vision: blood pouring from the hole in Wally Conway’s chest, the simpering sounds made by the other man, the one I didn’t know. I hear he was the county prosecutor. He shouldn’t have been there. It’s not my fault he was. But his death haunts me, will always haunt me, but what’s done is done.
I see the police car on the street, three men inside. I recognize two of them, the game warden named Joe in the back, Randy Pope in the front. Seeing them in the daylight, their faces pressed to the window as they pass, makes my blood boil. My reserve of will astounds even me. The sight of them fills me with renewed strength.
I wonder where they’re going. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that they’ll be back.
I sing,
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
15
THE STATE-OWNED Mitsubishi MU-2 whined and shook as the twin props gummed their way through the thin mountain air and achingly pulled the airplane from the runway into the sky. Joe kept his eyes closed and his hands gripped tightly on the headrest of the seat in front of him as the ground shot by and he wondered if they’d reach cruising altitude before the plane shook apart. For the longest time, he forgot to breathe. The aircraft was the oldest one in the state’s three-plane fleet, and Joe had heard it described as “the Death Plane” because it was the same make and model that had crashed years before and killed the popular governor of South Dakota. Joe wondered if his governor was sending them a message by ordering the old death trap out of mothballs in the Cheyenne hangar and sending it north to pick them up. Inside, the seats were threadbare and a detached curl of plastic bulkhead covering vibrated so violently in the turbulence that it looked like a white apparition. There were six seats in the plane, three rows of two. Randy Pope sat in the first row and had put his briefcase on the seat next to him so Joe couldn’t use it. Not that Joe wanted to. Instead, he took a seat in the third row so he could grip the headrest in front of him and, if necessary, pray and vomit unobserved.
Eventually, as the craft leveled out and stopped shaking, he relaxed his grip, took a breath, chanced looking out the cloudy window. It helped, somewhat, to get his bearings. The Bighorns rose in the west looking hunched, dark, and vast like a sleeping dinosaur, and the town of Buffalo slipped beneath them. He noted how the North Fork and Middle Fork of the Powder River, Crazy Woman Creek, and the South Fork flowed west to east, one after the other, like grid lines on a football field. Joe envisioned each from ground level where he was much more comfortable. It calmed him to put himself mentally on the ground on the banks of the rivers, either in his pickup or on horseback where he could look up and see the silver airplane like a fleck of tinsel in a blue carpet. He sat back, closed his eyes, and tried to slow his heart down.
JOE AWOKE with a start as the plane bucked through an air pocket that left his stomach suspended in the air a hundred feet above and behind him. He was surprised he’d actually fallen asleep. Joe gathered himself and looked outside and saw the rims and buttes of Chugwater Creek and the creek itself. It wouldn’t be long before they touched down in Cheyenne. His feet were freezing from what he guessed was a leak in the fuselage, and he lamented that he’d not had time to change out of his bloody clothes before leaving for Cheyenne to see Rulon. He rubbed his face and shook the sleep from his head, saw that Pope, two rows up, was staring ahead at the drawn curtains of the cockpit. Not reading, not talking on his cell phone. Just staring, deep in thought.
Joe unbuckled his belt and moved up a row until he was behind and to the left of his boss. “Why did you bring Wally Conway?”
The question startled Pope, who flinched as if slapped.
“I didn’t know you were there,” Pope said. “Quit sneaking up on me.”
“Why did you bring Wally Conway?”
Pope looked at Joe, his eyes furtive. “I told you. I wanted a friend with me. Someone I could trust.”
“Then why did you leave your friend?”
“He wanted to help. What, did you want to leave Robey up there all by himself while you and Buck Lothar went on your little walkabout?”
“So why did you leave?”
“I told you,” Pope said, his eyes settling on Joe’s forehead. Despite the cold inside the cabin of the plane, tiny beads of sweat had broken out across Pope’s upper lip. “I’ve got an agency to run. I can’t run it and communic
ate with the governor while I’m out running around in the woods.”
“Something’s not making sense to me here,” Joe said.
Pope squirmed in his seat and his face flushed red. “Wally Conway was one of my oldest and best friends.” Pope’s eyes misted. “I don’t have that many friends anymore.”
The admission startled Joe. Pope had never confided anything personal to him before.
“There’s something I want you to see,” Pope said, digging into the pocket of his coat and producing a small digital camera. He turned it on and an image appeared on the screen. He handed the camera to Joe with a hand that shook. “That’s Frank Urman’s head spiked to the wall of my room.”
Joe cringed and looked away.
“Look at this one,” Pope said, advancing the photo. “You can see the head of the spike he used to pound it into the wood. And here’s a close-up . . .”
Joe couldn’t bring himself to look.
“Disturbing, isn’t it?” Pope said. “I’m finding it real hard to get that image out of my mind. It’s hard to concentrate and think on my feet. I keep seeing that head on the wall.”
“We’re beginning our descent into Cheyenne,” the pilot drawled over the speaker. “Make sure you’re buckled up.”
Joe returned to his seat chastened. In the last few hours he’d accused his boss of getting two men killed and also tried to strangle him. Maybe, Joe conceded, what Pope said about him was true.
As the plane eased out of the sky and the landing gear clanked and moaned and locked into place, Joe closed his eyes and once again gripped the headrest in front of him as if the harder he squeezed it, the safer he would be.
