Below Zero

by C. J. Box

  Nate sighed, shooed the dogs aside, and entered the old ranch house. It smelled of cooked meat and old people. The décor looked frozen in time from 1972—avocado-colored appliances, gold shag carpeting, a digital clock radio on the kitchen counter with large red numerals.

  In the living room, a large woman in a floral printed dress was on her side on the floor in a hardback chair in the living room. Her arms were bound behind her back and her bare mottled ankles were tied to the chair legs with duct tape. The hem of her dress was pulled up because of her fall, exposing a meaty white leg. She had white hair, metal-framed glasses that made her big eyes look even bigger, and a sock in her mouth. She squirmed against her bindings, which consisted of shrugging her shoulders and wagging her head from side to side. He could see where she’d managed to wriggle across the carpeted floor and overturn a small telephone stand by banging it with her head. The phone lay useless near her hair. The cord had been cut.

  The way she glanced down at her leg said to Nate she was embarrassed by the exposure.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She said, “Ooof.”

  Nate said, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good guys. I’m not going to hurt you. Who put the sock in your mouth?”

  He flipped her dress back down and righted her chair before cutting the tape free with his Buck knife. She came up flailing and talking.

  “They took him, they took Walter with them. They tied me to that chair and left me like that. I could have suffocated and died. The dogs could have come in through the screen and eaten me! It might have been days before anyone found me. And they marched Walter out of here at the point of a gun.”

  Said Nate, “Do you have any idea where they’re going?”

  She shook her head, “No. They didn’t say.”

  “Do you have a car I could use? A truck?”

  “In the barn,” she said, gesturing outside. “Walter! They took him. I just can’t believe he’s gone. He has a doctor’s appointment in Rapid City tomorrow. He’s been having, you know, incontinence issues. He’s not a well man, and it’s taken me months to convince him to go to the doctor at all—and now this!”

  She reached out with both hands and squeezed Nate’s forearm. “He could die out there, you know. He doesn’t get out much. It’s been years since he’s been any farther away than Rapid City.”

  “Call the sheriff,” Nate said. “Let them know what happened and give them a good description of your pickup, including the license number. I’ve got to go.”

  “They cut the cord,” she said, shaking her head with disgust. “We have another phone in the bedroom and they cut that, too. Why did those men do this to us? Are they outlaws or something? The older one seemed kind of nice. The younger one—he gave me the willies.”

  Nate remembered the cell phone Joe had given him and pulled it out of his pocket and flipped it open.

  “Forget that,” she said. “We don’t have cell service here.”

  She was right—it read NO SIGNAL.

  “Who are you, anyway? Why are you here?”

  “Long story,” Nate said.

  “Where’s my Walter? What are they going to do with him? He has a doctor’s appointment in Rapid City tomorrow.”

  “You mentioned that,” Nate said, turning toward the screen door. “Look, I’ll send somebody here for you since you don’t have a phone. And I’ll do my best to find Walter.”

  “Please, please,” she said, hugging herself. “He’s all I’ve got. And he’s got that appointment—I don’t want him to miss it.”

  The screen door banged behind him.

  THERE WERE PICKUP TRUCKS from the seventies, eighties, and nineties parked side by side in the barn as well as a huge sedan with tailfins. The keys were in them, but none of them would start. The pickup from the nineties wouldn’t even turn over because the battery had been cannibalized for use somewhere else. Nate kicked the bumper in anger, then ran back in the house. Walter’s wife sitting at the table, still stunned.

  “I’m not having any luck out there,” Nate said. “Can I borrow whatever it is you drive?”

  “I don’t drive,” she said, “haven’t for years. When I need to go to town Walter drives me. I guess I could learn but I keep putting it off . . .”

  “Do you have anything that runs?” Nate asked, cutting in.

  “The tractor runs,” she said.

  “No, something faster.”

  She tapped her chin with her index finger. “Well, Walter keeps his dirt bike out in the shed for irrigating. That runs.”

  “Thanks,” Nate said, banging the door again.

  THE DIRT BIKE was stripped down, battered, and muddy. A squared-off irrigation shovel was mounted into a PVC pipe Walter had fashioned and wired to the frame. The key was in it and Nate got it going on the third kick. The motor revved and popped is if were spitting mad, and the shed filled with acrid blue exhaust.

  He guided it out through the door into the ranch yard and sat back in the saddle, getting used to the feel of it. The speedometer was broken, the dial frozen at 58 miles per hour. The gas gauge showed empty, but he hoped it was broken as well. The tachometer worked, as did the headlamp. As he raced through the gears he shot a backward glance over his shoulder.

  Walter’s wife stood at the screen door, dabbing her face with a handkerchief with one hand, waving goodbye to him with her other.

  He didn’t know Walter, but he wanted to return him unharmed. He had a doctor’s appointment, after all.

  NATE’S TOUGHEST DECISION was when he reached the T of the two-lane highway. Robert and Stenko had either turned north, toward Devils Tower, or south, away from it. Nate knew if he didn’t make the correct choice, it was the difference between tailing them and possibly saving Walter or losing them forever. He turned south on U.S. 85 and opened up the throttle. The shovel head hummed in the wind and chunks of dried mud shook loose from under the dented fenders of the bike.

  A lime-green Volkswagen beetle was in his lane. As he passed it, the faces of two college-age girls rotated toward him. The back of their car was crammed with boxes, pillows, lamps. Kids on their way to school to start the fall semester.

  He read in their puzzled expressions that he must look like a demented farmer who’d lost his way.

  NATE TORE THROUGH NEWCASTLE and didn’t stop. The dirt bike was starting to wear him down. His face stung from airborne insects that felt like pinpricks when they hit his skin. His hands and arms quivered from the hard vibration of the handlebars. The insides of his thighs burned because the motor was running so hot. He wondered if Walter had ever even taken the bike out on the open road and doubted the rancher had ever run it at highway speeds. It was like riding an electric razor.

  A lone convenience store and gas station squatted in the desert brush at Mule Creek Junction. Nate glanced down at his gas gauge—still showing empty—and swung into the gravel lot.

  He filled the tank and rubbed his face with his shaking free hand. If there was a car or truck of any kind for sale at Mule Creek Junction, he swore he’d buy it for cash or steal it if necessary. But the only vehicle—a dark red Ford Ranger pickup with bald tires—belonged to the attendant, a shockingly white middle-aged man with a dark maroon pompadour. When Nate went in to pay for the gas, the store was dark and crowded with ubiquitous snack racks and low-priced merchandise found at every truck stop in America. The owner apparently had a pawnshop operation going as well and had a wall filled with used firearms, auto parts, CDs, golf clubs, and dozens of other items tagged and stacked in two piles. He contemplated buying one of the AK-47s on the wall to take with him, but the idea of roaring down the highway in his shoulder holster and an AK strapped to his back was just too Mad Max.

  The attendant arched his eyebrows like a fellow conspirator and said, “Don’t assume the AK can’t be converted to full auto by someone who knows what they’re doing.”

  Nate said, “I know that. I’ve done it. But I’m not interested right now. Just the gas,
please.” He dug into his wallet and handed the attendant a $100 bill from a stack of them. “Unless you’re looking to sell your Ranger out front?”

  The attendant looked up. “Then how would I get home?”

  “I’m riding a bike. I’ll leave it. I won’t even deduct it from the balance.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t sell the Ranger to you. It ain’t mine. It belongs to my intended, Jenny Lee. I’m just keeping it running until she gets out of the women’s prison in Lusk. Sorry.”

  Nate shrugged.

  The attendant said, “You look lost, mister. Can I help you with directions?”

  Nate glared at him. “I’m not lost.”

  The attendant nodded at the dirt bike outside. “Thought maybe you were looking for a moto-cross track or something. There’s one over by Edgemont.”

  “No. I’m looking for a black Ford pickup.”

  The attendant paused while he made change. “F-350? Crew cab? Crook County plates?”

  Nate’s voice raised a click when he said, “Yes.”

  The man nodded. “They were through here a half hour or so ago. Saw an old rancher type inside without a hat. You can always tell a rancher by his tan line. And then some Dapper Dan type comes in and gives me a $100 bill, just like you did. I ain’t seen two $100 bills in a single day since, well, I don’t know.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Nate said, “Did you see anyone else in the truck?”

  The attendant pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “I had the impression there was someone in the back seat. I didn’t see him outright, but the Dapper Dan guy turned around in the front seat and it looked like he was talking to someone before he came in.”

  “Did the rancher look okay?”

  “He looked old and crabby. Typical rancher.”

  Nate nodded. “They were still headed south on Eighty-five?” He asked because at the junction there was a road back into South Dakota.

  “Yup, south,” the man said. “Mind if I ask you why you’re chasin’ them on a dirt bike?”

  Said Nate, “Yeah, I mind.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down,” the man said, raising both of his palms to Nate.

  “I’m perfectly calm.”

  Nate asked the attendant to call the sheriff after he left. “There’s a woman all alone in a ranch house between Upton and Osage, about six miles from the highway. Her phone is out and she might need help. Her husband’s name is Walter, but I didn’t get a last name. You might ask the sheriff to swing by there to check on her.”

  The man studied him for a beat, said, “I can do that.” Then: “You have bugs on your face. Doesn’t that hurt when they hit?” If there wasn’t genuine sympathy in the attendant’s tone, Nate thought he might have been tempted to pistol-whip him.

  “Yeah, it hurts,” he admitted.

  “I heard a story once,” the attendant said, leaning on the counter with $82 of Nate’s change still in his hand. “This guy was riding without protection like you and he ran square into a big old bumblebee. The bee struck him right in the forehead,” the man said, putting the tip of his finger on his own forehead as if Nate didn’t know where it was, “and it was just like a bullet, the impact of that damned bee. He never knew what hit him. The force of that bee knocked him silly and he spun out. He died a few days later in the hospital. Never even woke up.” As he ended his story, the attendant widened his eyes for emphasis.

  Nate reached out for his change. “If he didn’t know what hit him and he died, how in the hell do you know it was a bee?”

  The attendant nodded wisely. “It’s just a story I heard. I wasn’t there. What I was getting at is, do you wanna buy a helmet?”

  NORTH OF LUSK in his new German army helmet fitted with a darkened plastic face mask, Nate braced himself and cranked the hand-grip accelerator back as far as it would go. The motor went into a high-pitched whine, and he prepared for the bike to shake apart. But he needed to locate the black Ford before it got to Lusk to see what direction it would head. There were three choices: west on US 18 toward Manville and I-25; east to Chadron, Nebraska; on US 20; or farther south on 85 toward Fort Laramie and Rangeland. Although he’d been trying to think it through, he had no idea at all where Robert and Stenko were going. He wasn’t sure even they knew.

  Maybe a hospital, he thought. Stenko was obviously in pain.

  Dusk threw gold light over the tops of the rolling hills and deep shadows into the draws. It was getting cooler. His back ached and his muscles were screaming at him from the constant vibration. His right inside calf was soaked with hot oil the motor was throwing off.

  He topped a hill so fast he caught a few inches of air. The lights of the town of Lusk were splayed out ahead of him at the bottom of the rise. And the brake lights of a black Ford F-350 winked a mile ahead as the pickup slowed down at the town limits.

  Because of the whine and the wind, Nate almost didn’t feel the burring of Joe’s cell phone in his front jeans pocket.

  28

  North of Rangeland, Wyoming

  AFTER AN HOUR OF SMOLDERING SILENCE, ROBERT SAID, “I blame you for everything bad that’s happened.” Although he held the gun on his lap and the muzzle was pointed generally at the rancher, who drove, Robert was speaking directly to his father in the back seat.

  Stenko, through gritted teeth, said, “I’m shocked.” Despite his condition, he still managed to project sarcasm. Maybe sarcasm was the last thing to go, he hoped.

  The fight they’d had was vicious. It started when Stenko studied the numbers Leo had written on the napkin and said, “That rotten son of a bitch. These aren’t account numbers. These are the phone numbers of all of my Indian casinos. He just didn’t put hyphens in the numbers so you can’t tell at first. That rotten son of a bitch.”

  And Robert realized what Stenko was saying—that the $28 million was out of reach.

  “When I say everything, I mean everything,” Robert said bitterly. “I’m not just talking about the last two weeks when you corrupted me and made me see and do things I’d never even imagined. I’m not just talking about your great friend Leo who gave us worthless phone numbers. I’m talking about my whole life. Not to mention my entire generation. You people have ruined everything for us with your greed and your predatory consumption of all the resources of the planet. It’s like you were a bunch of drunks on the greatest bender of all time. You sucked everything dry and left us nothing but shit. When I think about it now, where I am, I think, How fucking selfish can you be?”

  Stenko took it all like lashes that didn’t really hurt. Instead, he sat up enough to see clearly out of the window near his feet. Man, what a night. The long vibrant Technicolor dusk that dominated the western half of the sky for a half hour had faded into an exhausted twilight of blue-grays and midnight blue. Hard pitiless stars grew in intensity as the sky went black. The sliver of a moon looked like an afterthought.

  “Do you ever think about what you left us?” Robert asked, his voice higher than normal.

  Stenko said, “Doesn’t it matter that I’m doing everything I can to make it up to you?”

  “It’s not enough,” Robert said with a snarl. “There are too many sins of the father.”

  He was angry, manic. Stenko figured Robert was going to vent at him until he could reach some kind of equilibrium and calm back down. In the meantime, though, Stenko just let it roll. He threw his attention toward the dregs of the big western sunset and thought about how few sunsets he’d actually studied in his lifetime and what he’d missed. To think that this fireworks display occurred every night of the year—amazing. And there was no cost of admission. All one had to do was watch it. The thought of that—just watching the sunsets—hit him like a hammer. So simple. And it had taken more than six decades to experience the joy of a great sunset. How could that be possible?

  It was then he knew this was it. It was crushingly disappointing for him to think that his last actual thoughts on earth might be about how beautiful the sunsets could
be in Wyoming. He wanted more than that. He wanted some kind of reward, some measure of wisdom. Something from heaven. But maybe, he thought, God had priorities and a pathetic gangster from Chicago was pretty low on the list. He could live with that, so to speak. But in his hope for wisdom, he was stuck on how mundane his insights were. And when he put them into words, ah!—it was awful. They tended to resemble the phrases on the posters mounted to the ceiling he used to read in agony while on his back in the dental hygienist’s office. Crap like:

  HAPPY IS THE HEART THAT HOLDS A FRIEND.

  HE WHO LAUGHS . . . LASTS!

  HARD WORK IS THE YEAST THAT RAISES THE DOUGH.

  On it went. Sappy bromides from another era. Crap from hayseed publications like Grit Magazine, the only subscription his mother ever had.

  Now here he was, wondering if he’d seen his last sunset and wondering if they’d always been that great. He doubted it. He wanted to think 99 percent of the time the sunsets sucked and no one noticed. That maybe this one was special.

  And he almost completely tuned out Robert going on and on and on about how it was all his fault that Robert was wretched.

  Stenko was ready to take responsibility for Robert’s wretchedness. It was just that he’d rather do so on his own terms. What a mistake it had been to try and reunite the family. How ridiculous it was that he’d fallen into a kind of pathetic role-reversal: the father desperately trying to gain some kind of approval from the son. Stenko realized how stupid it had been, how quixotic. To think that he could pick up the son who hated his guts and a girl who resembled Carmen and to somehow assemble them into what he remembered fondly as his only real family . . . was a failure. April/Carmen died once again and Robert tuned violent and then lost his mind. Stenko smiled with cynicism when he contemplated how badly it had gone. All Robert cared about was his silly website and his vapid efforts to save the planet. He didn’t know what April had wanted, and that continued to haunt him. April was special. What had happened to her was unfair. That she’d died in the crash Robert had carelessly instigated by grabbing for the cash in the box was more than tragic.