by C. J. Box
“What did you want to tell me, Deena?”
Joe searched her face, looked her over. Beneath the cover of foundation was a road map of acne scars on both cheeks. A smear of shiny, black lip gloss dropped from the corner of her mouth like a comma.
“I didn’t hear very much of what you two were talking about,” she said in a voice so weak he strained to hear it, “but I know there’s more to Cleve than meets the eye. And there’s less, too, I guess.” She looked up and smiled hauntingly, as if sharing a secret.
Unfortunately, Joe didn’t know what she meant.
“You don’t understand, do you?”
“Nope.”
She looked furtively over her shoulder in the direction of the Airstream, as if calculating how much time she had.
“Do you have an e-mail address?” she asked Joe.
He nodded.
“I’ll e-mail you, then. I don’t think we have the time to get into all of it here. I have an e-mail account Cleve doesn’t know about.”
“Deena, are you being held against your will?” he asked. “Do you need a place to stay?”
She grinned icily and shook her head. “There’s no place in the world, in the cosmos, that I’d rather be than right here, right now. I’m no prisoner. Cleve will help make things happen, and I want to be here to see it. To experience it. The other stuff doesn’t much matter.”
“What other stuff? And what will Cleve make happen?”
She shifted away from the trunk she was leaning on, stepping back from Joe.
“I can handle Cleve, don’t worry,” she said, smiling provocatively. “I can handle most men. It’s really not that tough.”
Joe started to speak, but she held up her hand. “I’ve got to go. I’ll e-mail you.”
He wrote his address on the back of a Wyoming Game and Fish business card and handed it to her.
“Thank you for the coat,” she said, before shrugging it off and turning back to the Airstream.
As he pulled it back on, he could smell her inside of his coat. Makeup, cigarette smoke, and something else. Something medical, he thought. Ointment, or lotion, he thought.
When he looked up she was gone.
As he crossed the bridge, Joe glanced over the railing. Jack, the retired guy, was fishing upstream near a sand spit. Not Ike was still down there, completing a long, looping fly cast into ripples that flowed into a deep pool. There were some big fish in the pool, Joe knew. Twenty-two-to twenty-four-inch browns, three to four pounds, big enough to be called “hogs” by serious fishermen. Not Ike looked up, saw Joe, and waved. Joe waved back and made another mental note to check out his license. Later, though, after he sorted out what had just happened in the Riverside Resort and RV Park. Later, when he could get back to being a game warden.
16
I BET CAM ten dollars I could get you to say three words tonight,” Marie Logue told Joe between courses that evening at the Longbrake Ranch.
“You lose,” Joe said, deadpan.
Marie at first looked disappointed, even a little shocked, then she shared a glance with Marybeth and both women whooped. Joe smiled.
“He’s been waiting for years to use that line,” Marybeth laughed. “You offered the perfect setup. Calvin Coolidge said it first.”
“Good one,” Cam said gruffly from across the table. “I’ll have to remember that one.”
“It’s not like you’ve ever had a problem talking,” Marie said through a false smile. “Except to me. Lately, especially.”
Cam rolled his eyes and looked away, dismissing her.
Uh-oh, Joe thought. They’re not kidding. He noticed that Marybeth caught it, too. She had mentioned the increasing tension at Logue Country Realty to him recently, saying that despite Cam’s success in listing ranches, homes, and commercial property, nothing was selling.
Dinner at the Longbrake Ranch had become a twice-monthly event since Missy had moved in with Bud. In addition to Joe and Marybeth and the grandchildren, Missy often invited a number of other people, all of them influential: ranchers, business owners, the editor of the Roundup, and state senators and representatives. Tonight, however, it was just the Picketts and the Logues. Missy was, Joe grdugingly admitted, an excellent hostess. It was something she was born to do and she thrived at it. The events typically began with drinks beneath the canopy of old cottonwoods out back or in the huge living room when it was cool or windy, then moved to the dining room for dinner and wine, and ended up with the men in Bud’s cavernous study and the women in the living room. Missy moved graciously from guest to guest, asking innocuous questions, showing them the renovations she was supervising in the old ranch house, laughing at their jokes, discussing her wedding plans, urging them to top off their drinks. Her face assumed a luminescence that made her truly beautiful, if one didn’t know any better, Joe thought.
Joe had made halfhearted attempts to get out of the dinners before but hadn’t succeeded. Marybeth felt obligated to attend, she said, and made the case that it was important for their girls to have a good relationship with their grandmother. Joe suspected that Marybeth enjoyed the socialization and discussion, although she claimed it didn’t matter that much to her. Sheridan and Lucy, Joe guessed, leaned more toward his point of view than their mother’s. Rarely were there other children at the dinners.
May we be excused?” Lucy asked. She sat with Jessica Logue and Sheridan. She was asking on behalf of all three girls.
Marybeth looked to Marie, and both mothers nodded. Lucy and Jessica had not played with each other since they got in trouble and both were transparently pleased that the dinner had brought them together again.
“Should they go outside?” Marybeth asked Joe.
“They’ll be within sight,” Missy broke in, dismissing her daughter’s concern. Then whispered: “Nothing has ever happened out in the open, honey.”
“Stay close to the house,” Marybeth called after them as the three girls thanked Missy for dinner before scrambling away from the table and out the front door.
“We’re just going to see the horses,” Sheridan called out as the screen door slammed.
After dinner, talk turned to the mutilations and the death of Tuff Montegue. Bud Longbrake questioned Cam Logue about the economic effects the crimes had had on the valley, particularly in regard to land values.
“We can only pray it’s temporary,” Cam said. “But it’s reduced land values and home values at least twenty percent, by my guess. Twelve Sleep County is radioactive.”
He shook his head. “In one case, I’ve got a willing seller and a willing buyer, but the buyer has decided now to hold out a little longer for a price reduction. The sellers are battling among themselves whether to reduce the price a little or not. Meanwhile, nothing is happening.”
Bud smiled knowingly. “I think I know the ranch you’re talking about. Those crazy sisters. They’d be rich if their daddy hadn’t sold the mineral rights to the place. Nobody ever used to think that much about it. Everyone figured if there wasn’t oil on their land—and there never was—that selling the mineral rights was just free money from suckers. I hear the plan is to put two thousand CBM wells on the land.”
Cam nodded vaguely. He obviously felt uncomfortable talking about the specifics of the ranch or the terms. But Bud liked to needle and pry, and was good-natured about it.
“It’s been crazy,” Marie said, shaking her head.
“Marybeth mentioned that on top of everything else you have company right now,” Missy said to Cam and Marie.
Cam laughed and ran his hand through his thick, blond hair. “Yes, it’s not exactly the best time in the world to have my whole family here for a visit.”
“It never is,” Missy cooed sympathetically. This from the woman who camped out in his house for a month and a half before moving in with Bud Longbrake, Joe thought sourly.
As the talk turned back to more mundane topics, Joe’s thoughts drifted away from the table. He kept replaying the morning at the Rivers
ide Park and his conversation with Cleve Garrett. He still could not shake his discomfort. The point Garrett had made about the differences in the deaths of Tuff Montegue and Stuart Tanner had eaten at him all afternoon. Yet again, nothing seemed to make sense or connect as it should.
Joe?” Marybeth said, her voice breaking into his thoughts. “Bud is talking to you. Are you going to answer his question?”
Joe looked around and realized that Missy had paused in midserve of dessert and was looking at him expectantly. Cam and Marie were silent, waiting for the answer to the question that Joe hadn’t heard. The conversation, which a few moments before had been lively and flowing around him, had died. He could hear the clock tick in the next room. Marybeth looked exasperated, as she often did when he lapsed into what she called “Joe Zone.” It particularly annoyed her when he did it in front of Missy because Marybeth thought it made him look ignorant.
Joe cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”
The three girls lined up outside of the corral looking at Bud Longbrake’s horses in the last moments of dusk. They leaned forward and rested their arms on the rails, peering inside at a dozen stout ranch horses. Roberto, the remaining ranch hand, broke open bales and tossed hay to them over the fence. Sheridan cocked a foot on the bottom rail. She found the grumm-grumm sound of horses eating extremely soothing.
Sheridan said, “I heard Grandmother Missy say that Mister Bud brought all of his horses in from the mountains and put them in the corral because of the aliens.”
Lucy looked up at her with wide eyes. “Did she really say ‘aliens’?”
“Yes, she did. I heard her tell Mrs. Logue that.”
“Man, oh, man.”
Behind them, in the ranch yard, the sensor on the light pole hummed and the light clicked on as the sky darkened. Although it really didn’t make sense that it could get colder from one moment to the next simply because the sun dropped behind the mountains, Sheridan gathered her coat closer around her. It had to do with the altitude and the thin air, her dad had told her.
Jessica said, “If we’re going to be out here, maybe we should have bought those aluminum-foil hats those boys were selling in the cafeteria.”
“What are you talking about?” Sheridan said, and Lucy laughed. They told Sheridan about the caps. Then they said they thought it was unfair that their parents had not allowed them to play together after school for the last week because of their visit to the “haunted shack.” Sheridan needed to see it, Lucy said. The shack would scare her, as it did them. Maybe they would see who lived there.
“It’s probably a poor homeless guy,” Sheridan said.
“Or . . .” Jessica said, pausing dramatically, “it’s the Mutilator!”
“Jessica!” Lucy exclaimed. “Stop that. You’re acting like Hailey, trying to scare everyone.”
Jessica giggled, and after a short pause, Lucy joined in. Once their giggles had stopped, the two girls changed the subject to a mutual friend’s upcoming birthday party. While they chattered, Sheridan watched the horses in the corral. Something seemed wrong. She knew from their own horses that once the hay was tossed out the horses were single-minded about eating for the next few hours until it was gone. It was odd, she thought, that the horses hadn’t settled into their eating routine, but continued to mill about in the corral. They ate for a few minutes, then shuffled restlessly.
“Don’t the horses seem nervous?” she asked.
Lucy and Jessica had been in deep conversation about things that had happened in school that day, and how Hailey Bond had gone home sick.
“What about them?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know anything about horses,” Jessica said. “Ask me about something I know about, like piano lessons.”
Sheridan dropped it. “Girlie girls,” she said, dismissing them.
But she was sure that something was wrong in the corral. One of the horses, a dun, broke from the herd and rushed toward the girls, stopping short just in front of them and causing all three to step back momentarily. The dun faced them, his nostrils flared and his eyes showing wild flashes of white. His ears were pinned back. Then just as suddenly, the horse relaxed and bent his head down for a mouthful of hay.
“What did she want?” Jessica asked Sheridan.
“He’s a he,” Sheridan said. “He’s a gelding, do you know what that means?”
“No.”
“Then I won’t tell you. But I don’t know what he wanted. Horses shouldn’t do that when they have dinner to worry about. Something’s wrong.”
Tuff could be a pain in the ass,” Bud Longbrake said over a snifter of after-dinner brandy in his study, “but no one deserves to die like that.”
Cam murmured his agreement and sipped his own drink. Joe had passed on the brandy and poured bourbon into his glass.
All three men were now in the book-lined study.
“Most employees can never be counted on,” Bud said. “Loyalty lasts as long as the next paycheck. They all feel like they’re owed a damned living, like they’re entitled to it. That’s why I like hiring guys like Roberto, who know they’re getting a hell of a fair shake. But Tuff worked here at least five times over the years. Twice I fired his ass, but the other three times he quit to do something else. He was a surveyor’s assistant for a while, then a cell phone customer cervice rep. Imagine that—a cowboy service rep.
“Then after being a fake mountain man in Jackson Hole for a while, old Tuff was back in this very office with his hat in his hand, begging for his old job back. Now he’s gone.”
Joe had looked up sharply as Bud talked; something had tripped a switch.
“Bud, did you say Tuff worked with a surveyor?”
“Yup. Why?”
“I’m not sure,” Joe shrugged. “It’s just interesting.”
Joe noticed that Cam Logue was looking him over closely, apparently trying to figure something out. He met Cam’s eyes, and Cam looked away.
“Tuff did lots of things,” Bud said, laughing. “Did I tell you the story he told me about trying to lift some woman at a chuck-wagon dinner theater for tourists? When he was playing a mountain man?”
While Joe listened, he refreshed the ice in his glass from a bucket on Bud’s desk. The curtains on the window were open, and it was dark outside. It was getting late. He could use this as a reason to move Marybeth on, he thought. There was school tomorrow, after all.
Outside, he could see his daughters and Jessica Logue in the dim cast of the yard light.
“Something’s definitely weird with the horses,” Sheridan said to Lucy and Jessica, interrupting their debate over who was the cutest boy in the sixth grade.
It was getting too dark to see individual horses in the corral but the herd was a dark, writhing mass. Occasionally, a horse would break loose like the dun had earlier, charge and stop abruptly, and she could see its shape against the opposite rails. But, like the dun that had bluff-charged them, the stray would inevitably return to the herd. The footfalls of the horses were distinct, and muffled in the dirt, as was the sound of them eating.
“Maybe it’s the Mutilator,” Jessica said.
“Stop it,” Lucy said sharply. “I’m not kidding.”
“I agree,” Sheridan said. “Knock it off.”
“I’m sorry,” Jessica said in a near whisper.
Then, from the corner of the corral, within the dark herd, a horse screamed.
Inside the house, Marybeth jumped. “What was that?” “Just the horses,” Missy said, wearing her hostess smile and filling coffee cups on a silver tray. “Bud brought them down to the corral.”
“Mom,” Marybeth asked, “why did he bring them down?” The tone in her voice caused Missy to frown.
“You know,” she said, “since Tuff was killed, Bud’s been a little nervous about the stock.”
Marybeth cursed. “The girls are out there.”
Marie covered her mouth with her hand.
Marybeth was halfw
ay to the front door when Joe suddenly strode out of the study and over to her. Cam appeared at the study door with a drink in his hand, watching Joe with concern.
“Did you hear that?” Marybeth asked him.
“I did,” he said.
The deep bass drumming sound of horses’ hooves filled the night and reverberated through the ground itself as Joe ran from the porch toward the ranch yard and called aloud.
“Sheridan! Lucy! Jessica!”
Grabbing a flashlight from the glove compartment of their van as he passed, Joe thumbed the switch. No light. The batteries were dead, damn it. He thumped the flashlight against his thigh and a weak light beamed. He hoped the dying batteries held.
Looking up toward the corral, he could see a kind of fluttering across the ground that made his heart jump. The fluttering, though, turned out to be his daughters and Jessica Logue who were running across the ranch yard toward him from the corral with coats, hair, and dresses flying.
Thank you, God, he whispered to himself as they neared.
“Dad! Dad!”
They met him at the same instant that the outside porch lights came on and the front door opened. He could hear a rush of footsteps behind him as Sheridan and Lucy flew into him, hugging him tight. Jessica veered toward the house and buried her face in her mother’s waist.
“Something happened with the horses while we were out there,” Sheridan said, her words rushing out. “They just went crazy and started screaming.”
“It’s okay,” Joe said, rubbing their backs. “You two seem all right.”
“Dad, I’m scared,” Lucy said.
Marybeth came down from the porch and both girls released Joe and went to her. Joe looked up to see Bud Longbrake filling the door, a .30-.30 Winchester rifle in his hands. He was looking toward the corral.
“Do you have a flashlight, Joe?” Bud asked, walking heavily from the porch.
“Yes, a bad one,” Joe said.
“Bring it,” Bud said, passing the van and walking across the ranch yard toward the corral.
Joe nodded, even though he knew Bud couldn’t see him in the dark. He wished he had brought his pickup, with his good flashlight as well as a spotlight, instead of the van. His shotgun—the only weapon he could hit anything with—was nestled behind the coiled springs of his pickup bench seat.
