Joe squatted so he could look at Keeley’s face at eye level. What he saw disgusted him, terrified him. He thought of what Keeley had done to his family. What he had done to Wyatt. What he could do to him and others if he recovered, as unlikely as that seemed. J. W. Keeley would always be a threat to him and to everyone around him.
“I need a doc,” Keeley said. “Call me a doc. I ain’t got long like this.”
Joe said, “Six years ago Wacey Hedeman was in a situation just like yours. He was down on the ground bleeding. I let him go. It was the wrong decision.”
Keeley studied Joe and sneered, “You got a badge. You can’t just do that.”
Joe said, “Not anymore,” and raised the Glock, pressed it against Keeley’s forehead.
Behind him, Nate called out, “Joe! Don’t!”
Joe pulled the trigger. Keeley’s head kicked back against the barn door and he slumped over to the side, dead. Even Joe couldn’t miss from an inch away.
WHEN JOE STOOD and turned, he saw Nate stumbling across the grass toward him. Nate was hurt.
“The son-of-a-bitch Wyatt coldcocked me when I looked away,” Nate said unsteadily. There was blood on the side of his head.
“Wyatt did that?” Joe asked, his voice disembodied due to what he had just done. He didn’t feel triumphant, or guilty. He didn’t know how he felt yet.
Behind Nate, a curl of smoke came out of an upstairs window of the ranch house. Then another. And the windows lit up with flame inside.
Joe approached Nate, his gun hanging limply at his side. He was numb everywhere. Although he knew what he was watching, it seemed as if it were on a movie screen; it didn’t seem real. He could still feel the sharp recoil of the gun in his hand, feel the shock waves shoot up his arm from the shot. Thought about the way Keeley had simply collapsed on himself and pitched to the side, like a side of beef, the evil spark gone that had once lit him up.
Thinking: Killing is easier than it should be. John Wayne Keeley probably had the same thought.
Then: What has happened to me? How could he have dared to threaten my daughters?
FLAMES WERE LICKING through the windows and front door, the roof was burning. Joe could smell the smoke, hear 120-year-old wooden beams popping inside the structure.
“Where’s Wyatt?” Joe asked, his voice seeming hollow, lifeless.
“I think he got out,” Nate said, now recovered enough to stand next to Joe.
“Nope,” Joe said, pointing. “There he is.”
Wyatt appeared on the side of the house through the smoke. He was hard to see clearly because of the pulsing waves of heat. But it was big-shouldered Wyatt, walking straight toward the house with something over his shoulder.
Opal. Stiff as a board.
Wyatt carried the mount of his mother through the front door, straight into the teeth of the fire.
“My God,” Nate said. “He’s making a funeral pyre.”
“I was sure wrong about Opal,” Joe said, his voice tinny and distant.
Nate said, “Before he thumped me, Wyatt told me his mother died of a heart attack that morning after some guide named Wayman threw her in the river. She died peacefully, and Arlen found her. Arlen buried her in secret because he knew about the will giving Hank the ranch, but Wyatt saw him and dug her up. Wyatt made her into what she always wanted to be—immortal. And what he always wanted her to be.”
“Pleasant,” Joe said.
“Hell of a legacy,” Nate said.
AS DUSK APPROACHED, Joe sat with his girls in Wyatt’s shack. Doris comforted Julie, whispering to her that things would be all right. Julie appeared catatonic. Sheridan reached out to her, held her hand.
The house continued to burn until it collapsed in on itself. The rain stopped and the sky cleared.
Joe was surprised to find out that telephone service was restored to Wyatt’s phone, and he called Marybeth.
“I’m with the girls,” he said. “They’re safe.”
He listened with tears in his eyes as Marybeth cried with joy, and handed the phone to Sheridan and Lucy so they could talk with her.
When they finally handed the phone back, Joe gave her an abbreviated version of what had happened. Since the girls were listening, Joe didn’t tell her about any of the details, only that J. W. Keeley had brought the girls to the ranch, that they’d been saved by Wyatt, and that Keeley and the Scarlett brothers had had a fight which resulted in the house burning down.
The story shocked her into silence.
“There’s a lot more to it, isn’t there, Joe?”
It was as if she knew he’d killed J. W. Keeley in cold blood.
“Yes, there is. But it’s for later,” he said.
She said the sheriff’s office had just called and they were sending the helicopter out. It should be there any minute.
“Is Nate still there?” she asked.
“Yes, but I haven’t seen him recently.”
“You might want to tell him the sheriff is coming,” she said.
Joe agreed and hung up.
JOE COULD HEAR the distant approaching thump of the helicopter as he walked the ranch yard. The smoke from the fire stung his nose and made his eyes tear up.
Nate was gone. So was a drift boat Joe had seen earlier leaning against the barn. And so was J.W. Keeley’s body. Joe guessed it was in the fire, where it would be discovered with the others. Neat and clean.
Joe drew his weapon and threw it as far as he could into the river. His holster followed.
It was crashing in on him now: what had happened, what he’d done, how J.W. had forever welded the fates of the Keeley, Scarlett, and Pickett families together by death.
As he saw Sheridan and Lucy walking toward him from Wyatt’s shack, he thought: But we are the ones who are left standing. Unlike Keeley or the Scarletts, Sheridan and Lucy are still here.
And that was all that mattered.
Sheridan stood close to him and asked, “Are you okay, Dad?”
“I’m fine,” he lied.
“What happens now?”
He could have said, “Everything will be different.” But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled his daughters close to him and waited for the helicopter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author, who has read too many overlong acknowledgments in novels lately, would like to thank those who significantly contributed to the research and writing of this book, including Sergeant Nadim Shah of the Wyoming Department of Corrections in Rawlins; D. P. Lyle, M.D.; Jim Hearne of MHP in Cheyenne, who went through hell on earth in an actual ranch dispute much like the one described in the book; Wyoming game warden Mark Nelson and his lovely wife, Mari, who read the book and offered suggestions and corrections, as always; and Mark Weak-land, who was my partner in an inadvertent drift-boat rocket ride down the North Fork of the Shoshone River near Cody, much like the one depicted in the novel. Thanks also to Don Hajicek for cjbox.net.
Special thanks to the publishing pros, especially my editor, Martha Bushko, who makes every book better than it ever was imagined; Michael Barson and the Putnam team, who have supported every novel when they didn’t have to; and my agent, Ann Rittenberg, who dives deep in the murk of submerged wreckage and surfaces holding up answers.
Turn the page for a preview of
FREE FIRE
The next Joe Pickett novel
by C. J. Box
Available in paperback
from Berkley Prime Crime!
1
Bechler River Ranger Station Yellowstone National Park July 21
A HALF HOUR AFTER CLAY MCCANN WALKED INTO the backwoods ranger station and turned over his still-warm weapons, after he’d announced to the startled seasonal ranger behind the desk that he’d just slaughtered four campers near Robinson Lake, the nervous ranger said, “Law enforcement will be here any minute. Do you want to call a lawyer?”
McCann looked up from where he was sitting on a rough-hewn bench. The seasonal ranger saw a big man, a soft man with a s
unburn already blooming on his freckled cheeks from just that morning, wearing ill-fitting, brand-new outdoor clothes that still bore folds from the packaging, his blood-flecked hands curled in his lap like he wanted nothing to do with them.
McCann said, “You don’t understand. I am a lawyer.”
Then he smiled, as if sharing a joke.
2
Saddlestring, Wyoming October 5
JOE PICKETT WAS FIXING BARBED-WIRE FENCE ON A boulder-strewn hillside on the southwest corner of the Longbrake Ranch when the white jet cleared the mountain-top and halved the cloudless pale blue sky. He winced as the roar of the engines washed over him and seemed to suck out all sound and complexity from the cold midmorning, leaving a vacuum in the pummeled silence. Maxine, Joe’s old Labrador, looked at the sky from her pool of shade next to the pickup.
Bud Longbrake, Jr., hated silence and filled it immediately. “Damn! I wonder where that plane is headed? It sure is flying low.” Then he began to sing, poorly, a Bruce Cock-burn song from the eighties:If I had a rocket launcher . . .
I would not hesitate
The airport, Joe thought but didn’t say, ignoring Bud Jr., the plane is headed for the airport. He pulled the strand of wire tight against the post to pound in a staple with the hammer end of his fencing tool.
“Bet he’s headed for the airport,” Bud Jr. said, abruptly stopping his song in midlyric. “What kind of plane was it, anyway? It wasn’t a commercial plane, that’s for sure. I didn’t see anything painted on the side. Man, it sure came out of nowhere.”
Joe set the staple, tightened the wire, pounded it in with three hard blows. He tested the tightness of the wire by strumming it with his gloved fingers.
“It sings better than you,” Joe said, and bent down to the middle strand, waiting for Bud Jr. to unhook the tightener and move it down as well. After a few moments of waiting, Joe looked up to see that Bud Jr. was still watching the vapor trail of the jet. Bud Jr. shot out his cuff and looked at his wristwatch. “Isn’t it about time for a coffee break?”
“We just got here,” Joe said. they’d driven two hours across the Longbrake Ranch on a two-track to resume fixing the fence where they’d left it the evening before, when they knocked off early because Bud Jr. complained of “excruciating back spasms.” Bud Jr. had spent dinner lobbying his father for a Jacuzzi.
Joe stood up straight but didn’t look at his companion. There was nothing about Bud Jr. he needed to see, nothing he wasn’t familiar with after spending three weeks working with him on the ranch. Bud Jr. was thin, tall, stylishly stubble-faced, with sallow blue eyes and a beaded curtain of black hair that fell down over them. Prior to returning to the ranch as a condition of his parole for selling crystal methamphetamine to fellow street performers in Missoula, he’d been a nine-year student at the University of Montana, majoring in just about every one of the liberal arts but finding none of them as satisfying as pantomime on Higgins Street for spare change. When he showed up back at the Longbrake Ranch where he was raised, Bud Sr. had taken Joe aside and asked Joe to “show my son what it means to work hard. That’s something he never picked up. And don’t call him Shamazz, that’s a name he made up. We need to break him of that. His real name is Bud, just like mine.”
So instead of looking at Bud Jr., Joe surveyed the expanse of ranchland laid out below the hill. Since he’d been fired from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department four months before and lost their state-owned home and headquarters, Joe Pickett was now the foreman of his father-in-law’s ranch—fifteen thousand acres of high grassy desert, wooded Bighorn Mountain foothills, and Twelve Sleep River valley. Although housing and meals were part of his compensation—his family lived in a 110-year-old log home near the ranch house—he would clear no more than $20,000 for the year, which made his old state salary look good in retrospect. His mother-in-law, Missy Vankueren-Longbrake, came with the deal.
It was the first October in sixteen years Joe was not in the field during hunting season, on horseback or in his green Game and Fish pickup, among the hunting camps and hunters within the 1,500-square-mile district he had patrolled. Joe was two weeks away from his fortieth birthday. His oldest daughter, Sheridan, was in her first year of high school and talking about college. His wife’s business management firm was thriving, and she outearned him four to one. He had traded his weapons for fencing tools, his red uniform shirt for a Carhartt barn coat, his badge for a shovel, his pickup for a ’99 Ford flatbed with LONGBRAKE RANCH painted on the door, his hard-earned authority and reputation for three weeks of overseeing a twenty-seven-year-old meth dealer who wanted to be known as Shamazz.
All because of a man named Randy Pope, the director of the Game and Fish Department, who had schemed for a year looking for a reason to fire him. Which Joe had provided.
When asked by Marybeth two nights ago how he felt, Joe had said he was perfectly happy.
“Which means,” she responded, “that you’re perfectly miserable.”
Joe refused to concede that, wishing she didn’t know him better than he knew himself.
But no one could ever say he didn’t work hard.
“Unhook that stretcher and move it down a strand,” Joe told Bud Jr.
Bud Jr. winced but did it. “My back . . .” he said.
The wire tightened up as Bud cranked on the stretcher, and Joe stapled it tight.
THEY WERE EATING their lunches out of paper sacks beneath a stand of yellow-leaved aspen when they saw the SUV coming. Joe’s Ford ranch pickup was parked to the side of the aspens with the doors open so they could hear the radio. Paul Harvey news, the only program they could get clearly so far from town. Bud hated Paul Harvey nearly as much as silence, and had spent days vainly fiddling with the radio to get another station and cursing the fact that static-filled Rush Limbaugh was the only other choice.
“Who is that?” Bud Jr. asked, gesturing with his chin toward the SUV.
Joe didn’t recognize the vehicle—it was at least two miles away—and he chewed his sandwich as the SUV crawled up the two-track that coursed through the gray-green patina of sagebrush.
“Think it’s the law?” Bud asked, as the truck got close enough so they could see several long antennas bristling from the roof. It was a new-model GMC, a Yukon or a Suburban.
“You have something to be scared of?” Joe asked.
“Of course not,” Bud said, but he looked jumpy. Bud was sitting on a downed log and he turned and looked behind him into the trees, as if planning an escape route. Joe thought how many times in the past his approach had likely caused the same kind of mild panic in hunters, fishermen, campers.
Joe asked, “Okay, what did you do now?”
“Nothing,” Bud Jr. said, but Joe had enough experience talking with guilty men to know something was up. The way they wouldn’t hold his gaze, the way they found something to do with their hands that wasn’t necessary, like Bud Jr., who was tearing off pieces of his bread crust and rolling them into little balls.
“She swore she was eighteen,” Bud said, almost as an aside, “and she sure as hell looked it. Shit, she was in the Stockman’s having cocktails, so I figured they must have carded her, right?”
Joe snorted and said nothing. It was interesting to him how an old-line, hard-assed three-generation rancher like Bud Longbrake could have raised a son so unlike him. Bud blamed his first wife for coddling Bud Jr., and complained in private to Joe that Missy, Bud’s second wife and Marybeth’s mother, was now doing the same thing. “Who the fuck cares if he’s creative,” Bud had said, spitting out the word as if it were a bug that had crawled into his mouth. “He’s as worthless as tits on a bull.”
In his peripheral vision, Joe watched as Bud Jr. stood up from his log as the SUV churned up the hill. He was ready to run.
It was then that Joe noticed the GMC had official State of Wyoming plates. Two men inside, the driver and another wearing a tie and a suit coat.
The GMC parked next to Joe’s Ford and the passenger door open
ed.
“Is one of you Joe Pickett?” asked the man in the tie. He looked vaguely familiar to Joe, somebody he might have seen in the newspaper. He was slightly built and had a once-eager face that now said, “I’m harried.” The man pulled a heavy jacket over his blazer an zipped it up against the cold breeze.
“He is,” Bud Jr. said quickly, pointing to Joe as if naming the defendant in court.
“I’m Chuck Ward, chief of staff for Governor Rulon,” the man said, looking Joe over as if he were disappointed with what he saw but trying to hide it. “The governor would like to meet with you as soon as possible.”
Joe stood and wiped his palms on his Wranglers so he could shake hands with Ward.
Joe said, “The governor is in town?”
“We came up in the state plane.”
“That was the jet we saw, Joe. Cool, the governor,” Bud Jr. said, obviously relieved that the GMC hadn’t come for him. “I’ve been reading about him in the paper. He’s a wild man, crazy as a tick. He challenged some senator to a drinking contest to settle an argument, and he installed a shooting range behind the governor’s mansion. That’s my kind of governor, man,” he said, grinning.
Ward shot Bud Jr. a withering look. Joe thought it was telling that Ward didn’t counter the stories but simply turned red.
“You want me to go with you?” Joe asked, nodding toward the GMC.
“Yes, please.”
“How about I follow you in,” Joe said. “I need to pick my girls up at school this afternoon so I need a vehicle. We’ll be done by then, I’d guess.”
Ward looked at him. “We have to be.”