Below Zero

by C. J. Box

  “Look,” Joe said, “don’t do anything crazy.”

  “Stenko is a dangerous man,” Coon said.

  And suddenly Joe visualized the helicopter swooping in over his pickup toward Stenko’s car, guns blazing. Coon and Portenson would love to get Stenko. Capturing or killing a fugitive like Stenko might result in Portenson’s promotion and transfer out of Wyoming, which was what he wanted most.

  Joe and Sheridan exchanged glances. She said, “Don’t tell them, Dad.”

  He put the phone face down on his thigh to cover the mike. “I might have to,” he said.

  She looked away.

  To Coon, Joe said, “Promise me you’ll make your presence known to them without any hijinks. Promise me you’ll give them plenty of opportunity to pull over and give themselves up.”

  Muffled conversation on the other end. Joe muttered to Sheridan, “I’ve got nothing to bargain with right now. They know our location and Stenko’s location. They can do anything they want and they know it.”

  Coon came back, said, “I give you my word.”

  Joe said, “What about Portenson?”

  “He gives you his word, too.”

  Said Joe, “He did that once before. When he broke it he told me, ‘Never trust a fed.’ Put him on. I want to hear it for myself.”

  After a beat, Portenson said, “Damn it, Joe. We want Stenko alive and kicking. We need his testimony.”

  Joe felt a wave of relief, said, “Okay, then.”

  Suddenly, the cab of his truck exploded in white light as the helicopter bathed it with their halogen spotlights. They came swooping down with a roar. Sheridan covered her eyes with her hands and Joe squinted in order to see.

  Just as quickly, the spotlights shot ahead up the two-track and found the fleeing vehicle, lighting it up as if it were daylight. Stenko was driving a battered silver SUV with Wyoming plates. Joe could see the silhouettes of two heads in the vehicle, one dark-haired and one light-haired, the dark-haired one driving.

  Two people, not three, Joe thought. Who was missing or hiding? Robert?

  “Is that April?” Sheridan shouted over the roar of the helicopter.

  “Don’t know,” Joe yelled back, as the SUV took a sharp right off the road and bounced through untracked sagebrush. The spotlights lost it for a moment but found it again as the helicopter hovered overhead.

  Portenson’s sharp voice filled the night: “You in the SUV . . . this is the FBI. You need to pull that vehicle over right now and come out with your hands in the air. I repeat, this is the FBI and you need to stop the vehicle immediately and get out.”

  Joe felt himself gasp as he saw something come out of the driver’s side window—an arm, a hand, a gun in the hand . . .

  Three heavy concussions from the handgun and three orange fireballs into the sky. The helicopter banked sharply to the left and roared away, the spotlights crazily strobing the distant hillsides. The SUV plummeted into darkness as the aircraft fled.

  “Oh no,” Joe said. “I don’t know if the helicopter got hit but Stenko’s trying to get himself killed!”

  “And April,” Sheridan cried.

  The shots had been wild, Joe knew. The driver couldn’t have aimed so much as stuck the gun out the window and fired. Still, it was provocation enough for the FBI to return fire.

  Joe turned off the gravel road into the brush. The tires heaved over sagebrush and Sheridan was tossed around inside, her arms flying. He thought if he could cut the corner and head off the SUV, Stenko might think he was surrounded and give up.

  The chopper did a long arc through the sky and came back. In seconds it was once again back over the top of them, this time without the spotlights. Instead, Joe could see what looked like two red eyes like fireflies dancing on top of the SUV. He recognized them as laser sights that were likely mounted on automatic weapons. The FBI could open up any second and cut the SUV—and everyone in it—into pieces.

  Panicked, Joe grabbed his cell—which was still connected to Coon and the speaker inside the copter—and shouted, “They’ve got a hostage in the vehicle . . . a minor.”

  Silence. Joe knew what he’d done. Sheridan glared at him. Whether April was actually a hostage or was along for the ride could be sorted out later, he thought.

  “A hostage? Who is the minor?” Coon asked, after no doubt being fed the question from Portenson. Joe noted that only one red eye remained on the top of the SUV. He guessed Coon had lowered his weapon while he questioned Joe. Which meant Portenson had not.

  “Our foster daughter, April Keeley,” Joe said in a rush of words. “She’s the one who’s been texting my daughter.” In his peripheral vision he could see Sheridan slump into the door.

  “Impossible!” Portenson shouted, once again apparently wresting the phone away from Coon. As he did, the second laser eye blinked out on the top of the SUV. “Is this your idea of a joke? Is this aimed at me because I was there when she died, Pickett? Are you trying to say she’s alive and with David Stenson? Come on . . . I was there.”

  “I know you were,” Joe said. “But she claims to be with Stenko. Which is why you can’t attack that vehicle until we figure this out. Do you understand? If you do, the only way you’ll ever get out of Wyoming is as a civilian because you completely botched this thing and got a teenage girl killed. And worse, you’ll never see the end of me.”

  Portenson sputtered something.

  “I’m not kidding,” Joe said. “Leave that vehicle alone until we can get a visual in the light and see for sure who is in it. We need to make them give it up without a fight so April can get away.”

  He tossed the phone aside. The helicopter spotlights came back on and lit up the SUV.

  To Sheridan, he said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of any other way.”

  That’s when the passenger door of the SUV opened and a female flew out into the dirt, arms out and hands clawing the air, blond hair flying like flames behind her in the harsh beams.

  “DID YOU SEE THAT?” Coon shouted to Joe.

  “Yup. I’ve got her,” Joe said.

  “Pick her up and we’ll stay with the vehicle,” Coon said.

  Sheridan shouted, “Oh, no! I hope she’s okay!”

  Joe slowed down, hit his high beams, and cut the sneak lights. The scrub brush obscured where she’d landed. She’d not gotten up. Sheridan unbuckled her seat belt and shinnied halfway out of her open window, shouting, “April! It’s me, Sheridan! Are you okay? April!”

  Joe heard the pop-pop-pop of additional shots up ahead as Stenko or Robert fired wildly again at the helicopter, but he didn’t look up. April was somewhere in the brush, possibly hurt, possibly dead.

  The automatic weapons in the helicopter opened up and the sound was like twin buzz saws. Joe looked up to see angry streams of tracers pouring from the chopper into the SUV, raking it from hood to tailgate. Windows exploded and pellets of glass cascaded like droplets from a splash in a lake. The SUV lurched forward until one of the wheels dropped into a badger hole, where it stopped abruptly and rocked. Plumes of radiator fluid rose from the undercarriage. The helicopter hovered, looking for signs of life, before slowly descending and kicking up dust.

  “Dad!” Sheridan shouted, pointing to a thin figure rising from the brush like a specter. Joe braked and swung his hand spotlight in the direction Sheridan was pointing.

  The woman was thin with scraggly blond hair, hollow cheeks, and haunted eyes. She wore an open flannel shirt that hung from her skeletal frame over a stained white tank top. She held her hands up and grimaced. Her open mouth revealed missing teeth. Even at that distance Joe knew a meth addict when he saw one. Sheridan slid back into the cab. Disappointed and confused, she said, “Who is she?” Then: “Oh my God, Dad, was April in the car?”

  “I don’t think so,” Joe said, watching the skids of the chopper kiss the top of brush as it settled to earth. “I think April’s long gone.”

  “Then what’s going on? Why did those men in the helicopter say it
was April’s phone?”

  Joe said, “Because it probably is.”

  19

  ACCORDING TO A DRIVER’S LICENSE FOUND IN HIS BLOODY hip pocket, the body in the SUV belonged to one Francis “Bo” Skelton, thirty-four, of Moorcroft, Wyoming. A call via SALECS to dispatch in Cheyenne revealed Skelton had a significant rap sheet including multiple arrests for possession of methamphetamine, marijuana, and crack cocaine as well as one arrest for B&E that was withdrawn by the Crook County prosecutor when Skelton agreed to cooperate with authorities. Local law enforcement, who had been waiting in vain at the I-90 roadblock, knew Skelton as a rounder and informant who was working with a joint local/state task force to infiltrate methamphetamine traffic in northeastern Wyoming. When not doing drugs or informing, Skelton ran parts for oil well and gas supply companies based in Gillette.

  The girlfriend of the deceased, Cyndi Rae Mote, thirty-eight, sat on Joe’s pickup tailgate with a blanket wrapped around her to ward off the predawn chill. It didn’t help much because the few teeth she had still chattered. She told Joe she’d ridden to the Savageton Bar that evening and they stayed until last call. As they left the bar she said the “alcohol caught up with her” and she staggered to a garbage barrel in the parking lot to throw up. The effort knocked her over and she was scrambling on all fours to get back on her feet when she found the cell phone in a stand of weeds.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It looked like a perfectly good phone. I was gonna turn it in to Badger in case someone wanted to claim it . . .”

  Joe said, “Badger?”

  “The manager. He’s the bartender, too.”

  Joe scribbled the name into his notebook, even though he had his mini-cassette tape recorder running in his breast pocket for backup. “Do you have a last name?”

  “Mote,” she said, spelling it: “M-O-T-E.”

  “Not yours,” Joe said patiently. “Badger’s.”

  “Oh. No, I guess not.”

  Joe thought, Badger should be easy to find. He glanced up to locate Agents Portenson and Coon, to see if he should call them in to participate in his interview with Cyndi Mote. He found them both where he expected them to be. Coon was circling the SUV with his flashlight, looking at the damage he’d helped inflict. Joe thought, When Coon was talking to Joe the evening before from his kitchen table with his son chattering at him, neither one of them could have imagined how the night would end. Joe felt bad for Coon. He knew Coon to be tightly wound but professional, basically good-hearted and honest. He doubted Coon had ever drawn his service weapon before, much less brandished an AR-15 with laser sights. Joe could only imagine what was going through his mind now that they’d confirmed that the entire incident, which resulted in a dead body, was all predicated on an error.

  Meanwhile, Portenson was in the bubble of the helicopter making and taking calls. In a situation like this, Joe thought, raw priorities were revealed without pretense. While Coon was pensive, reflecting on what he’d done, Portenson was reaching out to people who could help bolster his case and save his job. Joe looked back to Cyndi Mote, assessing her. “Go ahead,” he said.

  She said, “Anyway, I was gonna turn it in but Bo looked at it and said it was one of those cheap-ass phones like the ones you get at Wal-Mart. He said somebody probably used it up and threw it away.

  “He was right. When I turned it on the battery light was flashing,” she said, “but I figured I’d get as many calls out of it as I could before it died.”

  Her version confirmed Coon’s claim that the phone was being used to make other calls. It also explained the Wyoming area code and why the FBI hadn’t instantly tracked down the phone number to a specific user. April had been using a TracFone that could be purchased anywhere, loaded with minutes from a calling card, and used like any phone. It was a favorite among those who didn’t want or like long-term phone contracts, monthly bills, or the bells and whistles that came with more expensive phones. It was also the phone of choice among dealers and gangsters and others who didn’t want to be pinned down or tracked, and it came with a kind of temporary anonymity since the number assigned to the phone wasn’t assigned to a person but to the phone itself. But why had she thrown it away instead of recharging it or ordering more minutes? It didn’t make sense. Joe asked, “Who’d you call?”

  She grimaced again. Her lips peeled back and her eyes narrowed into slits. Joe realized it was actually her smile.

  “I called every ex-boyfriend whose phone number I could remember and told them they were full of shit,” she said, grinning/ grimacing.

  “Do you still have the phone?” Joe asked, thinking they better check the call log to make sure it was the same phone April had used.

  “I don’t know where it is,” Cyndi said, chewing on her nails. Joe saw that her nails were gnawed to the nub and bleeding. “It’s probably somewhere in Bo’s pickup. It’s probably shot up all to hell, like poor Bo.”

  Joe said, “Why did Bo stick his gun out the window and start firing at the helicopter? Couldn’t he hear them ordering him to pull over? If he had, none of this would have happened.”

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes as if to say, Boys will be boys. “I couldn’t hear them neither,” she said. “We kind of had the music up loud. Like full freakin’ blast. We were just relaxing, you know? Driving down some roads Bo knew from work. All of a sudden the sky was full of light from that damned helicopter and all hell broke loose.

  “I still can’t believe Bo started shooting,” Cyndi told Joe. “I knew he had a gun in the truck. I mean, who doesn’t around here? But when that helicopter showed up out of nowhere, Bo went postal and started screaming and shooting.”

  She pulled her blanket tight and leaned forward, lowering her voice as if to tell Joe a secret. He bent toward her. The smell of cigarette smoke and souring alcohol was overwhelming. “See, he’s officially helping the cops on some cases and he’s not supposed to be messing with alcohol or drugs anymore. That’s his part of the deal. And he’s not supposed to have a gun. But when that helicopter showed up, he just lost it. He didn’t want to get caught, I guess. I told him to stop but he pointed his gun at me and told me shut up.” She said the last part indignantly, and Joe nodded.

  “Back to the bar,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Who else was there? Anyone you didn’t know?”

  She shook her head, “Just energy guys. You know, hardworking Americans providing power for the rest of the country so they can all look down on us with their lights on. Oil guys, coal miners, gas guys. Some juggies and some surveyors loading up before they had to go home. Badger was there, of course.”

  “Mm-hmm,” he said, scribbling, encouraging her to keep talking. A surprising number of witnesses loved to have their words inscribed, he’d found over the years. It made them feel important that their words mattered to someone. It was the same impulse some people had to immediately commence talking whenever a television camera was around.

  “What I’m wondering,” Joe said, “was if there was anyone in the bar you didn’t recognize? Or maybe they just didn’t fit?”

  She gnawed on her fingers and looked up at the sky and closed her eyes. “Thinking,” she said aloud. Then she snapped her fingers. “There were two guys sitting in back by themselves,” she said. “I remember them now. One older guy and one handsome dude, but in an Eastern, kind of faggy bark-beetle way . . .”

  Joe interrupted. “What do you mean by that? Did he look homosexual?”

  She laughed huskily and shook her head. “No, worse. He looked like an environmentalist. I can spot ’em a mile away. You know how some people have ‘gay-dar’ when it comes to picking out gay people? Bo said I had ‘Gore-dar,’ the ability to pick out whacko enviros. You know, after Al Gore.”

  “Got it,” Joe said, suppressing a sigh.

  “Anyway, they sat a back table keeping to themselves. I think they were arguing about something. Badger kept delivering them drinks. I noted they shut up ev
ery time he took drinks over to them, like they didn’t want him to hear what they were talking about. That was unusual because everybody around here knows everyone else’s business. Well, they acted like they were having a big important discussion. The good-looking enviro had a laptop out, and he kept pointing at the screen to the old guy.”

  Joe paused. “Can you describe them a little better? I don’t have Gore-dar.”

  She giggled. “Sure. The old guy was big—he had a big head and a big face. Dark hair, mustache. Mid- to late sixties, I guess. He was dressed pretty well in that he wasn’t wearing Wranglers. Definitely not from around here. He had nice eyes—I remember that. Maybe six foot or a little over. Maybe, I don’t know, two hundred and fifty pounds? The one with the laptop had wavy brown hair and his shirt was open too much for around here. Like I said, handsome in a faggy way.”

  Joe thought, Stenko and Robert.

  “Was anyone with them?” he asked.

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “A teenage girl, maybe?”

  She barked a laugh. “Believe me, mister, if there was a teenage girl in that joint, I woulda known about her! I was the only female in the place!”

  Joe nodded. “You mentioned you went outside a couple of times. Did you see anyone in any cars?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t look,” she said. “I was, you know, getting high.”

  He paused, thinking what to ask.

  Then she said, “Hey, I remember something. Bo came back in once. He’d gone outside to piss. He likes—liked—to piss outside rather than inside. One of his quirks. Anyway, he sat down by me and said there was an underage girl out there in one of the cars who saw him pissing. He said she was kinda cute. I smacked him. I thought he was shitting me about seeing a girl. You know, hallucinating. Are you saying he wasn’t?”

  PORTENSON MADE CALL after call with a satellite phone. He was lit by the green glow of the instrument panel. He looked distressed and angry. The pilot sat silently next to him but made it a point to look away as if he found something out in the dark sagebrush worth careful study. The pilot wore sunglasses and headphones. Joe guessed he’d wear a grocery bag on his head if one were available.