Joe hated the fact that his only available weapon was his .40 Glock service piece. He was a poor pistol shot. Although his scores on the range for his annual recertification had risen a few points in the past two years, he still barely qualified. He knew if it weren’t for the sympathy of the range officer who’d followed his exploits over the years and graded him on a curve, he could have been working a desk at game and fish headquarters in Cheyenne. Joe’s proficiency was with a shotgun. He could wing-shoot with the best of them. His accuracy and reaction time were excellent as long as he shot instinctively. It was the slow, deliberate aiming he had trouble with.
As he staggered from tree to tree toward the meadow, he vowed that if he got off the mountain alive he’d finally take the time to learn how to hit something with his service weapon.
He felt oddly disengaged, like he was watching a movie of a guy who looked a lot like him, but slower. It was as if it weren’t really him limping through the trees with holes in his leg and his best horse bleeding to death on the side of an unfamiliar mountain. Joe seemed to be floating above the treetops, between the crown of the pines and the sky, looking down at the man in the red shirt moving toward what any rational observer would view as certain death. But he kept going, hoping the numb otherworldliness would continue to cushion him and act as a narcotic, hoping the pain would stay just beyond the unbearable threshold so he could revel in the insentient comfort of shock. And he hoped the combination of both would keep at bay the terror that was rising within him.
Now, though, there were four things of primal importance.
Find Blue Roanie’s body and the panniers. Recover his shotgun. Return to Buddy with the first-aid kit. Get the hell off the mountain.
THE PINE TREES thinned and melded into a stand of aspen. He couldn’t remember riding Buddy into aspen at all, but at the time he’d been addled and in furious pain. He recalled gold spangles in his eyes and realized now that they’d been leaves that slapped against his face as Buddy shot through the trees.
Aspen trees shared a single interconnected root system that produced saplings straight from their ball of roots through the soil. They weren’t a grove of individual trees like pines or cottonwoods, but a single organism relentlessly launching shooters up through the soil to gain territory and acquire domination, to starve out any other trees or brush that dared try to live in the same immediate neighborhood. A mountainside of aspen was enjoyed by tourists for the colors and tone, but it was actually one huge voracious organism as opposed to hundreds or thousands of individual trees. Joe had always been suspicious of aspens for that reason. Additionally, the problem with aspen for a hunter or stalker or a crippled game warden was their leaves, which dried like brittle parchment commas and dropped to the ground. Walking on aspen leaves was akin to walking on kettle-fried potato chips: noisy. Joe crunched along, left hand on a tree trunk or branch and right hand on the polymer grip of his Glock, when he realized how loud he was, how obvious. And how silent it was, which meant the brothers were still there.
ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES, Joe shinnied over downed logs to the meadow. With each yard, the lighting got brighter. His wounded leg alternated between heat and cold, pain and deadness. When his leg was hot, he knew he was bleeding. He could smell the metallic odor. When it was cold, his leg felt better. But it scared him, because dragging his leg felt like pulling thirty pounds of cold meat through the leaves. If it was cold, it was gone. So in a way, he welcomed the waves of heat.
Trees thinned. The meadow pulsed green and bright in the sunlight. Joe heard one of the brothers laugh like a hyena: Cack-cack-cack-cack-cack . The sound made the hairs on the back of Joe’s neck prick up, as if he were a dog.
And he thought: This is as basic as it can be. I’m a dog. They’re animals as well. Or something like animals.
What he saw through the tumbled pick-up sticks of untrammeled timber made his skin crawl.
The brothers were on either side of Blue Roanie. They were laughing in the way they laughed, which was blunt and brutal, the laugh of men who were comfortable with themselves and had no desire to please anyone else.
Cack-cack-cack-cack-cack.
One of them held his bow with one hand and a bundle of arrows in the other.
The other brother dropped a knotty pine war club so he could admire Joe’s shotgun. The .308 carbine was in the grass near his feet.
Blue Roanie didn’t move. He was dead. The arrow that had pierced his neck had severed an artery and he’d bled out, and the black blood formed a large pool like liquid tar in the grass. Joe was grateful his end had come quickly.
The Grim Brothers stripped the body of Blue Roanie, taking his saddle and bridle and tossing them to the side. Caleb ducked under his front leg and lifted it on his shoulder with a grunt. Camish produced his bowie knife and used it to pry Roanie’s horseshoe off. When he was through, he moved on to the other three. As the horseshoes came off, they were tossed into a pile near the saddle. They landed with a metallic clink.
The dead horse was now scavenged of anything valuable, he thought. But they weren’t done. With brutal efficiency, they skinned the horse and pulled the hide away from the carcass as if it were a new living room rug. Then, with the skill of a butcher, Camish severed the front quarter, barely touching a bone or joint with his blade.
Caleb struggled under the weight of the severed front quarter but still managed to carry it away. Joe had never contemplated what the front leg of a horse weighed, but he guessed one-eighty to two hundred pounds. More than he weighed. He thought, They’re strong, too. Inhumanly strong.
Joe knew he was up against a force he’d never faced but somehow he’d always imagined was out there. He didn’t like his chances.
He briefly closed his eyes and thought of Marybeth, how she’d miss him. Worse, he thought of his daughters, who simply assumed he’d always prevail and come home and be Dad. If only they knew this situation. But the last thing he’d want them to see was a man named Grim carry away the front quarter of a horse they’d loved. Blue Roanie was in the second generation of Pickett Family horses, and like his predecessor, he’d been killed in action.
They’d be righteously angry, Joe thought. And Marybeth. How to explain that her horse Buddy had bled out in the middle of nowhere because Joe couldn’t recover the first-aid kit? She’d understand, of course. So would the girls. But he didn’t want them simply to understand. He wanted them to think of him as their hero and their bulwark against everybody and everything out there. He didn’t want them to think of him as the man who failed. As the dad who failed and let himself die.
He thought: I’m in trouble, but I’ve got more to live for than just me.
He had a sidearm he was no good at shooting and the Brothers Grim had his shotgun, carbine, gear, first-aid kit, intimate knowledge of the mountains, and a violent sense of purpose. All he had was his determination to help his horse, fix his leg, and get home to his family.
He was outgunned, outnumbered, and outmatched.
Still disembodied, still watching himself from above, still not able to really believe what was happening before him and his sudden unwelcome descent into brutality, he observed with clinical detachment as the Brothers Grim disemboweled Blue Roanie with a knife and slid her bundled entrails out onto the grass like a mass of steaming ropy snakes. Caleb reached down into the gut pile and came out with the huge dark liver. It was shaped like a butterfly with black fleshy wings. Caleb raised it to his mouth and took a ferocious bite. With rivulets of black blood streaming down his mouth, he offered it to Camish, who took a bite as well. The pagan hunting tradition complete, the brothers set about further dismembering Blue Roanie.
He could tell by the way they shot wary glances at the trees for him that when they were done, he’d be next on their schedule.
4
AT THE SAME TIME, IN SADDLESTRING, WYOMING, MARYBETH Pickett saw the last thing she wanted to see through the living room window: her mother’s full-sized black Hummer as it roared
into the driveway. The grille, a mouthful of chrome canine teeth, stopped inches from the back of Marybeth’s parked minivan.
“Crap,” Marybeth said.
“Excuse me?”
Marybeth turned quickly from the window and felt her face flush. “I’m sorry,” she said into the telephone to Elizabeth Harris, the vice principal of Saddlestring High, “I didn’t mean you. I just saw something outside that . . . alarmed me.”
“Goodness, what?”
“A predator,” Marybeth said, immediately sorry she had voiced it.
Harris said, “I read in the paper where people in town have been seeing a mountain lion. Did you see it?”
“No, I was mistaken,” Marybeth said, and quickly moved on. “But you were saying?”
What Harris was saying was that April Keeley, their fifteen-year-old foster daughter, was absent again for her math tutor. It was the third time she hadn’t shown up since summer makeup courses had begun the week before, she said.
“This is news to me,” Marybeth said acidly. “I should have been informed before this.”
“It sort of fell through the cracks,” Harris said. “We’re short-staffed in the summer and we thought you’d been called.”
“I haven’t been.”
“Obviously, we know she has plenty of making up to do,” the vice principal said, lowering her voice to sharing-a-conspiracy level. “We’re fully aware of her . . . difficulties. But if we want April to be able to be competent with her classmates at the ninth-grade level—and we do—she needs to be there on time and prepared to complete the remedial coursework before the school year begins.”
“I’m sorry,” Marybeth said. “I had no idea. I mean, she left for school on time after breakfast. . . .” She recalled two of April’s friends, Anne Kimbol and Michelle McNamara, standing shoulder-to-shoulder together on the front porch waiting for April and clutching their math textbooks. Those girls were trouble.
She looked up to see Sheridan, eighteen, standing in the threshold of the hallway in her maroon polyester Burg-O-Pardner smock, about to go to work for the afternoon. The logo for the restaurant—a hamburger wearing a cowboy hat and boots with spurs, and holding a carton of their special Rocky Mountain oysters—was on a patch above her breast pocket. Sheridan, like Marybeth, was blond and green-eyed and serious.
Sheridan wanted to save some money for her senior year in high school, and she’d discovered to her surprise she was a pretty good waitress. She was juggling her part-time job with “optional” summer basketball practice. Sheridan played forward for the Saddlestring Lady Wranglers. Although she had her mother’s concentration and determination to make it all work, her basketball coach—a venal, sideline-strutting peacock of a man who interpreted Sheridan’s job and other interests as a personal affront to him and his potential success—had threatened to take her out of the starting lineup if she missed another practice. The coach, she thought, would make her senior year in high school miserable.
Sheridan had overheard her mother and mouthed, “April, again?”
Marybeth nodded to her daughter and said to the vice principal, “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’ll drive her there myself if I need to and watch her go inside. I’ll deliver her to the classroom if necessary. And the good news is my husband will be back next week for good. If I can’t bring April in, I’ll ask Joe to do it. He’s used to shuttling kids.” And thought, Wherever he is. That he hadn’t called the night before still bothered her. There were so many things she needed to tell him, so many things they needed to talk about, starting with the fact their foster daughter’s behavior was spinning out of control.
Mrs. Harris thanked Marybeth and said something about the unseasonably warm weather, and Marybeth nodded with distraction as if the vice principal could see her, said “Bye,” and disconnected the call.
She placed the phone in the charger and asked Sheridan, “What is she doing, that girl? Where is she going and who is she with?” Putting Sheridan into the tough decision of ratting out her foster sister or maintaining the shared silence of the sisterhood.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Marybeth asked. “It’s for her own good. . . .”
Sheridan took a deep breath and prepared to say something when Missy knocked sharply on the front door.
“Later,” Sheridan said.
Marybeth thought she knew what was going on: Sheridan and April were battling. And it was going beyond normal sibling rivalry into full-fledged war. In the past year, Sheridan had assumed the old pecking order—with her in the top spot because she was the oldest and most responsible for April’s return—would resume. But April had come back with a trunk full of adult trauma and experience with which she challenged Sheridan. And everyone else. It was not the idyllic situation Marybeth had assumed it would be. And, Marybeth thought, as April herself thought it would be.
“For now,” Marybeth said dourly. “Later, we talk.” She gestured to the front door. “Would you please let her in?”
Sheridan welcomed the reprieve and shouted over her shoulder to her thirteen-year-old sister, “Lucy, there’s somebody here for you!” and ducked back down the hallway with a satisfied smirk.
“I WAS SURPRISED to see your car home on a Wednesday,” Missy said, sweeping into the house with a kind of full-sized presence that belied her sixty-four years and petite figure. She wore a black silk pantsuit embroidered with the silhouettes of dragons, a purchase from China when she’d attended the 2008 Summer Olympics with her fifth husband, Earl Alden, known as the “Earl of Lexington,” who was a multimillionaire media mogul with a ranch outside of town and homes all over the world. With each husband, Missy had traded up. Her last husband, Bud Longbrake, had lost his ranch to her in the divorce when he’d discovered the handover was in small print in the prenuptial agreement he’d signed when he and Missy got married.
“I took the day off,” Marybeth said, looking around for either of her daughters for help or support. But Sheridan had slipped out the back to go to work and Lucy was hiding behind the door she’d been tricked to open to let her grandmother in. “Joe will be back the first of next week, as you know. I’ve been putting boxes of the girls’ things in his office and I needed to clean it all up.”
“Oh,” Missy said, “Joe. I’d so forgotten about him. I’ve gotten used to just you and the girls.”
“I’ll bet,” Marybeth said.
“There you are!” Missy said, turning and seeing Lucy behind her before her granddaughter could slither across the wall and dart up the stairs undetected.
“Hi, Grandma Missy,” Lucy said.
Missy enveloped Lucy in her arms, but turned her head slightly so her makeup wouldn’t smear on her granddaughter’s shoulder. Marybeth was startled to see Lucy was nearly the same height and build as her mother after a summer of fierce growth. Missy said to Lucy, “How’s my favorite granddaughter?”
“I’m fine,” Lucy said, forcing a girlish smile she reserved for photographs and her grandmother.
“Please, Mom . . .” Marybeth said.
“You know what I mean,” Missy said, dismissing her.
The animosity between Sheridan and her grandmother had almost reached the level of acrimony as that between Joe and Missy. So Missy no longer made an effort to pretend that she didn’t prefer Lucy. Like Missy, Lucy went for fine clothing and fine things. Missy disapproved of Sheridan’s nascent interest in falconry and science and her lack of interest in all things Missy.
To Lucy, Missy said, “And are you wearing that silk dress I brought you from Paris? The electric blue one?”
“School hasn’t started yet,” Lucy said. “But I will.”
Missy nodded with satisfaction.
Marybeth knew Lucy was fibbing. Lucy’d told her she was embarrassed by the dress. That it might as well have had MY GRANDMOTHER IS RICH embroidered on the back of it. That she’d never wear something like that to a seventh-grade dance. She’d also confessed she was getting more and more embarrasse
d in general by her grandmother, who sometimes acted as if they were contemporaries as well as allies. Marybeth still bristled at the memory of Lucy telling her Missy had said one of the bonds between them included the fact they “shared common enemies.” Meaning Marybeth and Joe.
Marybeth thought, Not now . . . I don’t have time for this.
MARYBETH’S business management company, MBP, had recently been purchased by a local accounting firm looking to widen its base. They’d retained her to run the company for a year while they incorporated her employees and contracts into the firm. Now that Joe was being sent home, it should have been the best of all worlds. But it wasn’t.
Managing the sale of her business, the transition into a larger and entrenched company, the running of the household with three teenage girls, and Joe’s yearlong absence had become almost unbearable. It was as if she were overseeing three full-time operations at once, she thought, and no one seemed to realize or appreciate the pace and scope of her responsibilities. Even Joe, who at least tried. The last time they’d talked, two nights ago over a scratchy satellite phone, Marybeth had declared that she was considering taking up heavy drinking. Joe had said, “You’re kidding, right?”
They sat on opposite sides of the dining room table. Her mother reached across and grasped her hand and said, “You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying, have you?”
“I thought you were talking to Lucy,” Marybeth said.
“No, Lucy managed to slip away,” Missy said, through a pearly-cold smile. “She’s never going to wear that blue dress, is she?”
“Mom, I don’t know,” Marybeth said with a sigh.
“It’s not a trivial matter. I can sense her slipping away from me. Perhaps due to the influence of her older sister and her father.”
“Please, not now.”