C. Box - Nowhere to Run

“I’m sorry,” Joe said.

“I’d rather be here,” she said, and smiled sadly. Joe reached out and squeezed her hand.

“Billings sucks,” April said. “Billings is nearly as boring as Saddlestring.”

“Our little ray of sunshine,” Joe commented. April scowled at him.

Sheridan said to April, “Maybe you should have stayed in Chicago.”

“Maybe I should have,” April shot back.

“Girls, please,” Marybeth said, sadness in her eyes.

Sheridan huffed and crossed her arms and looked away. April narrowed her eyes and glared at her, reminding Joe of a rattler coiling to strike.

April looked older than she was, he thought, which was perfectly understandable given the life she’d led. Her Wyoming reentry had not gone smoothly. She was sullen, sarcastic, and passive-aggressive toward her foster parents. When Marybeth complained to Joe about her, Joe responded by reminding Marybeth that April was fifteen and her behavior was fairly normal for her age. When Joe complained to Marybeth about April’s sullen attitude, Marybeth defended her foster daughter with the same reasoning. Both wondered if they’d be able to wait her out, all the while hoping she’d become sunny and productive and not wreck the dynamics of the family in the meantime. Meanwhile, the process for adoption had begun but stalled due to the complexity of April’s legal status. According to their lawyer, the problems weren’t insurmountable, but they’d take time to sort through. It would be costly, and Joe and Marybeth had asked him to set the case aside until Joe returned permanently to Saddlestring and could help oversee the progress. Since then, April hadn’t asked about how the adoption was going, and Marybeth hadn’t brought it up. The silent impasse, Joe knew, would have to be broken soon.

“There’s a nice mall,” Lucy said about Billings, ignoring April. “Mom said she’d take us there this afternoon.”

“Good,” Joe said, winking at Marybeth.

“Wow,” April said, rolling her eyes, “A mall . These people in Montana have thought of everything.”

“April,” Sheridan moaned.

April gestured toward the television set mounted on the ceiling that Joe had yet to turn on. “They’ve even got television, but probably, like, one channel.”

Joe searched in vain for the remote control to prove to her Montana had cable, but he couldn’t locate it.

“I just want everyone to be happy,” Lucy said, grinning. “Starting with me.”

“It always starts with you,” April said.

“It’s got to start somewhere.” Lucy grinned, but her eyes showed a glint of triumph for the comeback.

“Nice one,” Sheridan said.

“Get me out of here,” April said to no one in particular.

Marybeth took them to the Rimrock Mall.

Twelve Sleep County Sheriff McLanahan said, “knock-knock” but didn’t actually knock when he entered Joe’s hospital room with a deputy trailing. McLanahan was Joe’s age and the two had known each other for ten years, since Joe had moved to Saddlestring and McLanahan was a nascent deputy under the legendary Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum. Barnum had vanished off the face of the earth five years before, and there had always been whispers that Nate Romanowski had had something to do with it. Unfortunately, McLanahan had run for sheriff and won as a protege of Barnum. He’d adopted the same hamfisted, authoritarian approach to the job that Barnum had perfected. Nothing happened in the county that McLanahan wasn’t aware of or involved in, but at the same time he managed to keep an arm’s-length distance from the machinations, using intermediaries-often his team of four dull-witted cookie-cutter deputies-so if the situation went sour he could claim no knowledge of it.

Joe knew McLanahan disliked him and resented his presence, and he was aware that behind the scenes the sheriff had tried to get him reassigned or fired outright. The sheriff saw Joe as unwanted competition, and their clashes over the years had got more bitter, again a continuation of Barnum’s reign. Joe hadn’t seen McLanahan in the year he’d been in Baggs, but their relationship resumed where it had left off, when the sheriff said, “I’m startin’ to wonder if they’ve got you in the right kind of hospital here, Joe. I’m startin’ to think maybe it might be best to put you in one of those facilities with the rubber walls and elevator music because there’s a bunch of us fellers startin’ to believe you’ve gone crazy as a damned tick .”

He ended the sentence with a tinny uplift and a rural flourish, and the deputy behind him snorted a laugh of pure obligation.

Joe winced and fished for the control that powered his hospital bed so he could raise the head of it. He didn’t like the sheriff seeing him prone or in his stupid cotton gown. The fabric, he’d discovered to his horror, was decorated with a pattern of tiny yellow ducks. As the motor whirred and the head of the bed raised, Joe said, “I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing you again, sheriff.”

McLanahan clucked his tongue as if to say, Too bad for you , then settled heavily in a straight-backed chair to Joe’s right where Marybeth had been for two days. She’d left her sweater over the back, but McLanahan either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

McLanahan, originally from Virginia, had long ago completed a physical and mental transformation from a hotheaded deputy who spoke in a rapid-fire cadence to a slow-talking Western character who collected and used frontier folkisms that often made absolutely no sense to Joe. He wore a scuffed brown leather vest with a five-star sheriff’s badge, a big silver buckle, jeans, and crepe-soled cowboy boots. He owned three horses he’d never ridden that served as props for campaign posters and a twenty-acre parcel he referred to as his “ranch.” His huge mustache now stretched from his upper lip to his lower jaw and obscured his mouth, although his eyes were still sharp, small, and devious and gave him away as someone more into calculation and mythmaking than cow’s punching, Joe thought. The sheriff cocked a heel over the lower railing of Joe’s bed and removed his brown sweat-stained hat and fitted it on his raised knee. McLanahan was losing his hair, Joe noted, and he’d gained thirty pounds since he’d last seen him. The deputy, whose nametag read SOLLIS, was dressed in a crisp department uniform shirt and dark black jeans. He had a military buzz cut and dull, hooded eyes. McLanahan had long ago established a policy that the only Western character in the sheriff’s department would be the sheriff.

“Two hours ago, I got off the phone with the state DCI boys and Sheriff Baird down in Carbon County,” McLanahan said. “They’re coming down the mountain as we speak. What they told me made me climb in my rig and drive two hours north across the state line so I could tell you in person.”

Joe nodded. After Joe gave his version of events to the sheriff, Baird had quickly requested a team of investigators from the state to ride with him and his deputies into the mountains after the Grim Brothers.

“Does this have to do with some kind of inconsistency in my statements?” Joe asked. “An agent named McCue from DCI was asking me more questions earlier today.”

“I don’t know him,” McLanahan said. “And no, it has nothing to do with him, whoever the hell he is. Naw, what I heard I found out from the search team themselves.”

Indeed , Joe thought.

“Unlike a certain game warden,” McLanahan said, “the search team didn’t misplace their communications gear, so I’ve been getting updates every few hours for the past three days. There’s eleven men on horseback been all over those mountains. They been everywhere you described. Guess what they’ve found?”