Blood Trail

by C. J. Box

  “I’ll have to get permission to do that,” the agent said.

  “I’ll need it before I can leave,” Joe said.

  The agent got up and approached Portenson’s office and rapped on the door. Portenson signaled him in and Joe could overhear a sharp exchange.

  When the agent came out, he looked chastened. “We’ll do it, but we have to wait until Gordon checks in. We can’t just call him on his cell phone in case he’s in a meeting with Klamath Moore or something.”

  “How often does he call in?”

  “Twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. He calls during working hours.”

  “Did he call in today?”

  “I didn’t take the call, but he must have.”

  “So you won’t hear from him for three days, until next Thursday?” Joe asked.

  The agent nodded.

  “I hate to wait that long,” Joe said, mostly to himself.

  The agent shrugged. “Nothing I can do.”

  “There’s something else,” the agent said. “Agent Portenson asked me to tell you they’re bringing up the accused and the paperwork assigning him to your custody. He said Ms. Ennis needs to sign as well on behalf of the governor’s office.”

  Joe and Stella exchanged glances.

  “Don’t screw this up, Joe,” she said. “If my name’s on the document you better make sure you bring him back.”

  Joe shrugged. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I hope you’ll do better than that.”

  Joe’s phone burred in his pocket and he drew it out. It was Pope.

  “You need to keep me apprised, Joe,” Pope said, “every single step of the way. Every. Single. Step.”

  “I don’t work for you,” Joe said.

  “You don’t understand,” Pope said, his voice cracking. “This means everything to me. My agency, my career—”

  Joe snapped his phone shut as the heavy doors opened and Nate Romanowski was led into the room in an orange jumpsuit, his cuffs and leg irons clanking.

  But it wasn’t the Nate he knew, Joe thought. The man who shuffled forward with the crew cut, sallow complexion, slumping shoulders, and haunted blue eyes just looked like the container that used to house Nate.

  18

  THEY DROVE NORTH on I-25 under a wide-open dusk sky striped with vermilion cloud slashes stacked on the western horizon. The lights of Cheyenne were an hour behind them. Mule deer and pronghorn antelope raised their heads as the Escalade passed by, the tires sizzling on the highway, acknowledging the fact that Joe Pickett and Nate Romanowski were reunited. Or at least to Joe it seemed like it was what they were doing.

  Nate had a smell about him that hung in the closed space of the state Escalade. Sterile, institutional, vapid. A jail smell. He wore his orange prison jumpsuit and a pair of blue boat shoes without laces.

  “Nice sunset,” Nate said in a whisper so low Joe asked him to repeat it.

  When he did, Joe said, “Yup.”

  “They’ve got nice sunsets down here on the high plains,” Nate said. “I know this because I’ve watched three-hundred-and-five of ’em straight through a little gap in the window of my cell. This makes three-hundred-and-six.”

  NATE SEEMED to relax as they hurtled into the night, Joe thought, as if his friend were shedding bits of defensive armor that had formed on his body over the past year, leaving them to skitter across the highway behind them like chunks of ice from the undercarriage of a car. Nate said, “It’s no fun to be in prison, I don’t care what anyone says.”

  Joe grunted.

  “Can you pull over here?” Nate said, gesturing to an exit off the highway that led to a ranch a mile away whose blue pole lights twinkled in the darkness.

  Nate was out of the vehicle before Joe fully stopped it. Joe watched Nate stumble out and walk briskly into the brush, his broad back reflecting moonlight. Nate dropped to his knees and bent over forward, as if praying or in pain.

  Joe called, “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  It took a moment for Joe to realize Nate was burrowing his face into the ground, breathing in the sweet dusky smell of sagebrush and grass, filling himself with fresh outdoor air as if fumigating his lungs of tainted, indoor oxygen.

  While he waited for Nate, Joe called Marybeth on his cell phone.

  “I’ve got him,” he said.

  “Nate? How’s he doing?”

  “I can’t tell yet.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Outside the car smelling sagebrush.”

  She chuckled.

  “How’s Nancy?” he asked.

  “Doing well, considering. I just left her at her house. She’s got relatives on the way. I’m going to go home and bake her a casserole and bring it by tomorrow.”

  “How are the girls?”

  “Fine. Joe, it’s only been two days since you went up into the mountains.”

  “It seems longer than that.”

  “A lot has happened, hasn’t it? You need to come home and get some sleep.”

  “I need you.”

  “That’s sweet, Joe. But you need sleep even more.”

  He shook his head, not thinking that she couldn’t see him. “Did you hear the governor’s press conference?”

  She laughed drily. “Yes, it’s good to know you’re closing in on the bad guy.”

  “We aren’t,” Joe said with a sigh.

  “I didn’t think so. Maybe Nate can help you out.”

  Joe looked up to see Nate shedding his jumpsuit and rolling it into a ball, which he threw into the darkness like a football. Nate turned and walked back toward the Escalade in his laceless boat shoes, kicking off his baggy, dingy jail boxers. He left them draped in the branches of a mountain mahogany bush.

  “You might not say that if you could see him now,” Joe said.

  “Tell him hello,” she said. “Tell him we missed him.”

  “I’m going to tell him to put some clothes on,” Joe said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Joe said.

  “Call when you get close to town. Try to stay awake.”

  Nate climbed into the passenger seat, briskly rubbing his arms, chest, and thighs.

  “It feels good to get that shit off,” he said, closing the door.

  Joe eased onto the highway and set his cruise control at two miles under the speed limit. He didn’t want to risk being pulled in the governor’s car over by a trooper and trying to explain why there was a naked man sitting next to him.

  “JOE,” NATE SAID as they got back on the highway, “I’m not going back.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not going back.”

  “We’ll discuss it later.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” Nate said with absolute finality.

  TO KEEP AWAKE and try to make some sense out of the last two days, Joe detailed to Nate what had happened to the hunters and the investigation thus far. Nate listened silently, grunting and shaking his head.

  At a convenience store near Casper, Joe filled the Escalade with gas and bought a set of extra-large Wyoming Cowboys sweats inside from a discount rack. He handed them to Nate, said, “Put these on.”

  “I was just starting to feel good again,” Nate said sourly.

  THEY WERE south of Kaycee when Nate finally said, “Amateurs.”

  “Who?”

  “All of you. Everyone except the shooter. He’s been playing with you people.”

  “Maybe I ought to take you back,” Joe said.

  Nate snorted. “Don’t be so sensitive. When I think about what you’ve told me, there are some things that just don’t fall into place like they should. When you lay it all out, there are some wrong notes in the narrative.”

  “What wrong notes?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I’ve got to think about it more, let it settle and see what rises to the top or sinks to the bottom. But something just doesn’t work right here. It all seems so neat while at
the same time there’s something wrong.”

  “I have no idea what you’re saying,” Joe said, taking the exit for Kaycee.

  “Neither do I,” Nate said. “But I get the feeling none of this has much to do with hunting.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Great minds.” Nate smiled. “Hey, I’m hungry. Pull over here.”

  AS THEY entered the town of Kaycee, Joe and Nate both raised imaginary glasses and clinked them, said, “To Chris,” referring to the late, great singer, rodeo champion, and Wyoming icon Chris Ledoux, who died young and once lived there on a ranch outside the town limits. His family still did.

  Nate and Joe pretended to toast and drink. It was something they did every time they drove by.

  THE ONLY restaurant in Kaycee was closed, but Nate knew where the owner lived and directed Joe to a shambling log home in a bank of cottonwood trees outside the town limits. Nate got out and banged on the front door until a massive man threw open the door, ready to pound whoever was disturbing him. The fat, bearded man at the door was nearly seven feet tall and dressed in a wife-beater undershirt and thick leather gloves up to his elbows. Joe hung back while the man recognized Nate—a fellow falconer—and enthusiastically invited both of them into his home. The man pulled off the gloves he’d been wearing so his falcons could sit on his forearm while he groomed them, and started pan-frying two of the biggest steaks Joe had ever seen.

  While they ate, Nate and the restaurant owner—he introduced himself to Joe as Large Merle—talked falconry and hunting. Joe looked around the house, which was dark and close and messy. Merle obviously lived alone except for his falcons, four of them, all hooded and sleeping, perched on handcrafted stands in the living room. The place smelled of feathers, hawk excrement, and eighty years of fried grease and cigarette smoke.

  “D’you get your elk this year?” Large Merle asked Nate.

  “No,” Nate said. “I was in jail.”

  “Poor bastard,” Merle said. “And now you can’t go, since Governor Nut closed the state down. Man, if I could get my hands on the guy who shot those hunters I would break him in two.”

  Large Merle eyed Joe for the first time. “You gonna find that guy?”

  “We hope to,” Joe said.

  “You better,” Merle said. “Or we’re going to do it for you. That’s why we live here. And it won’t be pretty. How’s your steak?”

  “Huge.”

  Merle smiled and nodded. One of his prairie falcons dropped a plop of white excrement onto his ham-sized forearm like a dollop of toothpaste being squeezed from a tube.

  “Borrow your phone, Merle?” Nate asked.

  “You bet, buddy,” Merle said, then turned back to Joe as Nate took the phone into the other room.

  “I’ve heard of you,” Merle said, looking at Joe’s nameplate with narrowed eyes.

  “Is that good or bad?” Joe asked.

  “Mostly good,” Merle said, not expounding. “Me and Nate go way back. He’s the only guy know who scares me. Whoever that knuckle-head is killing hunters? He don’t scare me. But Nate scares me.”

  Joe sat back and put his knife and fork to the side of his plate. He’d eaten half the steak and couldn’t eat any more.

  Merle leaned forward. “Did Nate ever tell you about that time in Haiti? When the four drugged-out rebels jumped him?”

  “No.”

  Merle shook his head and chuckled, the fat jiggling under his arms and his chin. “Quite a story,” Merle said. “Especially the part about guts strung through the trees like Christmas lights. Ask him about that one sometime!”

  Joe nodded.

  “It’s a hell of a story,” Merle said, still chuckling.

  BACK IN the Yukon, Joe said, “Don’t ever tell me about Haiti.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because I don’t want to know.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s gone pretty well so far over the years with you not telling me what you do for a living. I think that’s best.”

  “Since you’re in law enforcement, I’d agree.”

  “And let’s not eat at Large Merle’s again soon.”

  “I needed a big steak. Merle and I go way back.”

  “So I heard. SO,” Nate asked, “how’s my girl?”

  “Marybeth?” Joe asked, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.

  “Sheridan,” Nate said, rolling his eyes. “The falconer’s apprentice.”

  Joe calmed. “She’s sixteen. That’s a tough age. She can’t decide if her parents are idiots or what. All in all, though, considering what she’s been through in her life, she’s doing well, I’d say. I sort of miss her as a little girl, though.”

  “Don’t,” Nate said. “From her letters, she sounds smart and well adjusted. And she doesn’t really think you’re an idiot. In fact, I think she admires her parents very much.”

  Joe had forgotten about the letters. “So why did you ask? You know more about her than I do now.”

  Nate laughed but didn’t disagree.

  IT WAS nearly midnight as Joe crossed over into Twelve Sleep County. The full moon lit up pillowy cumulus clouds over the Bighorns as if they had blue pilot lights inside, and the stars were white and accusatory in the black sky.

  “You can drop me here,” Nate said, indicating an exit off the two-lane that led eventually to his stone house on the banks of the Twelve Sleep River. Joe slowed.

  “You’ve got a ride?” Joe asked.

  Nate nodded. “Alisha. I called her from Large Merle’s. It’s been a while.”

  Alisha Whiteplume was a Northern Arapaho who had grown up on the reservation and returned to teach third grade and coach girls’ basketball at the high school. She was tall, dark, and beautiful with long hair so black it shimmered blue in the sunshine. Nate and Alisha had gotten together the previous year, and Joe had never seen him so head over heels in love.

  Joe stopped and got out with Nate. The night had cooled and Joe could see his breath. The air smelled of sage, drying leaves, pine, and emptiness.

  “You don’t have to wait,” Nate said.

  “I don’t mind. I don’t want to just leave you out here.”

  “It’s okay,” Nate said. “Really.”

  Joe looked at his watch—after midnight.

  JOE FELT it before he actually saw it, a falcon in the night sky, silhouetted against a cloud. The falcon, Nate’s peregrine, dropped from the cloud into the complete darkness beneath it and Joe lost track of it until it streaked through the air directly above their heads with a swift whistling sound.

  “How could the bird know you’re back?” Joe asked, as much to himself as to Nate.

  “The bird just knows,” Nate said.

  The falcon turned gracefully before swooping against the wall of a butte and returned, landing in the darkness of the brush about a hundred feet from the truck with a percussive flap of its wings.

  Nate turned to Joe. “You can go now. Let me get reacquainted with my bird.”

  “I’ll be in touch tomorrow, then,” Joe said. “Where will you be? Here or at Alisha’s?”

  Nate shrugged.

  “Nate, I’m responsible . . .”

  Nate waved him off. “Give me a couple of days. I need to get reoriented, get the lay of the land. I need to spend some time with Alisha and get my head back on straight.”

  Joe hesitated.

  “Besides,” Nate said, “you’ve gone the tracking-and-forensics route on this shooter, right? And you figured out exactly nothing. I need to try another angle.”

  “What other angle?” Joe asked.

  “Go home, Joe,” Nate said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Joe sighed.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch. Get going—go home and see Marybeth.”

  AS NATE RECEDED in the rearview mirror, Joe had a niggling feeling about the brusque way Nate had said good-bye. While Joe had witnessed, in the past, Nate doing some horrendous things—like ripping the ears off
suspects—he’d never known his friend to be rude.

  After cresting a rise and dropping down over the top, Joe killed his lights and pulled off the highway and took a weeded-over two-track to the north. The old jeep trail serpentined through the breaklands and eventually culminated at the top of a rise. When he used to patrol the area, the rise had been one of his favored places to perch and glass the high meadows and deep-cut draws of the terrain. With his lights still out and using the glow of the moon and stars, Joe climbed the vehicle up the rise and carefully nosed it just short of the top, carefully keeping the mass of the hill between himself and where he’d left Nate on the highway. He was thankful there were binoculars in the utility box of the Escalade.

  On his hands and knees, Joe scuttled across the powdery dirt, crying out when he kneed a cactus whose needles easily pierced through the fabric of his Wranglers.

  He eased over the top of the rise, fighting back feelings of suspicion and guilt, trying to convince himself he was looking out for Nate, not spying on him.

  He couldn’t see Nate in the darkness, but he could see the black ribbon of highway where he’d left him. And from the direction of Nate’s stone house, he could see a pair of headlights slowly picking their way across the breaklands toward Nate. Joe pulled the binoculars up and adjusted the lens wheel until the vehicle came into sharp focus. It was a light-colored Ford or Chevy SUV. He couldn’t yet see the plates. He didn’t know what Alisha Whiteplume drove these days so he didn’t know if it was her car.

  As the vehicle drew closer, Nate, with the peregrine on his fist, became illuminated in its headlights. He stood out, bathed in the halogen lights, darkness around him in all directions. Nate raised his arm with the falcon on it in greeting. The SUV stopped twenty feet from Nate. Dust from the tires lit up in a slow-motion swirl in the headlights. Joe swung the binoculars back to the car.

  When the passenger door opened, the dome light inside the SUV lit up and Alisha Whiteplume, looking tall and thin and striking, hurled herself out into the brush and ran toward Nate with open arms. Joe started to follow her with the glasses when he realized there were others in the vehicle, something he hadn’t expected.