C. Box - Cold Wind

She said, “So, when did you get your law degree? When was it you were elected by the voters in Twelve Sleep County to enforce the law?”

Joe said, “I’ve seen Marcus Hand in action. I’ve seen him win with less than this.”

“Besides,” she said, her voice lightening in tone, “who says he needs to know all this ahead of time?”

Joe looked suspiciously at his cell phone before raising it back up. “Dulcie, you didn’t just say that.”

She was silent.

“Dulcie, now I’m questioning your integrity.”

“I was just speculating,” she said, a hint of desperation in her voice.

“He knows,” Joe said. “Marybeth is talking to him.”

“Joe, you’re a son-of-a-bitch.”

He was speechless.

“And the same goes for your wife,” she said.

Joe took a deep breath. He said, “Dulcie, this isn’t you. This is somebody who wants to beat Marcus Hand so badly they’ve lost their judgment. Dulcie, I need to talk to Bud.”

Silence.

“You still don’t know where he is, do you?”

She said, “See you in court, Joe.”

“Dulcie, please-”

She hung up on him.

“You may not know where he is,” he said to the dead phone, “but I think I do.”

As he pulled back on the highway, he tried to call Marybeth, but his call went straight to voice mail. No doubt, she was speaking to Marcus Hand or her mother, or both. Telling them what he’d told the county prosecutor.

He said, “I’m headed back, but I’ll keep my phone on. I’ve got a stop to make on the way.”

Then: “I’m really disappointed in Dulcie. But she’s probably going to put your mother away. The women’s prison is in Lusk, by the way, if you ever want to visit her.”

Glendo Reservoir shimmered in the moonlight to the north and east of the highway. There were a couple of boats out there in the dark, walleye fisherman Joe guessed, and a few lights across the lake from a campground.

After his conversation with Schalk, he got angrier with each mile traveled. He was angry with Dulcie Schalk, Sheriff McLanahan, Bud Sr., Bud Jr., Orin Smith-the whole lot of them. But he traced most of his anger to his own frustration with himself. He couldn’t crack this thing, he might never be able to crack it, and he wasn’t sure, deep down, he wanted to.

What Smith had told him about The Earl and the way business was done in the country these days had instilled a deep and hopeless strain of melancholy. There was no right and no wrong anymore.

After filling his Jeep with gasoline in Jackson, Nate drove north and east toward the dark Gros Ventre Mountains via Togwotee Pass.

He pulled over on the two-lane highway before he reached the Togwotee Mountain Lodge. He got out and kept the engine running. There were walls of lodgepole pines on each side of the road and a channel of sky above his head like a river carrying fallen stars. The high mountain air, piney and cool with oncoming fall, helped place him back where he needed to be. Behind him, through the narrow clearing in the trees due to the road, he could see the tops of the Teton Range silhouetted on the horizon like the teeth of a frozen buzz saw. He reached down beneath the seat and checked to make sure his.500 hadn’t been stolen. It was there.

He shed his Jackson Hole clothes and threw them into a pile in the back and pulled on jeans and a heavy shirt. He laced his boots on tight.

Nate swung himself back into the cab of the Jeep and eased off the shoulder onto the blacktop. He hoped he could make it over the summit to Dubois before all the restaurants closed. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast in Chicago.

He planned to drive all night until he found and killed the person who’d given him up.

Nate leaned into the switchback turns coming down off the mountain. He drove fast and kept his lights dim so he could see beyond the orb of headlights for the eye reflections of elk or cows or mule deer on the road.

He thought about Alisha, how he hadn’t yet allowed himself to really mourn her. Even when he’d built the scaffolding for her body, he’d concentrated on the construction of it, the materials, the timbers, the sinews holding the joints together. How he’d hoist the body up without letting it fall apart on him. And he’d left her without looking back.

Still, though, he hadn’t wrapped his mind around the fact that she was really, truly gone.

He just knew he couldn’t do it, mourn her, until he’d avenged her first. In a strange way that made him feel increasingly guilty, he knew the journey to Eden and Chicago and back had been done with such a murderous single-mindedness that he’d used it to justify pushing his feelings away.

After it was done, he would slip onto the res and talk to Alisha’s relatives and the little girl she was taking care of and allow his focus and rage to turn into something else.

He wasn’t sure how to do it when the time came, what to say, or what words to use.

For the first time since it had happened, he gave it some consideration. Joe could help, he knew. Joe and Marybeth, especially. They were in the mainstream of sorts and Nate’s only real connection to the world of loving couples, growing children, mortgages, pet dogs, lawns, and social mores. It was a world he wished he understood and hoped he could enter some day, but it was still as foreign to him as daily life in Outer Mongolia. But because Joe and Marybeth were his only true connection to that world, he wanted to nurture them and protect them and keep them away from what he knew to be out there. Not that Joe wasn’t capable of protecting his family-he was, and in surprising ways-but Joe still seemed to believe in his oath and duty and in innocence and the law’s brand of justice. Nate didn’t want to be there if and when Joe learned otherwise, because it wouldn’t be pretty.

Marybeth could help him with the words, Nate thought, and Joe could stand by with nothing but his own kind of humility and decency that would be like an anchor or a wall for Nate to attach himself to.

There was nothing open in Dubois except a convenience store with shelves filled with processed food in plastic packaging. Nate bought a large paper cup of weak coffee (because there was no strong coffee), beef sticks that weren’t much more than stringy black muscle tissue laced with sodium and preservatives, and a package of string cheese.

It had been years since he’d eaten such things. He couldn’t wait to get this all over and harvest an elk and an antelope and grill the back straps.

What Laurie Talich had told him shouldn’t have been such a surprise, he thought. It all made sense when he thought about it and connected the dots. He was grateful his location hadn’t been determined by The Five, but through local channels.

He once again pushed the particulars of mourning out ahead of him and concentrated on the task at hand.

There was a compound to enter, and it was guarded. There might be motion detectors and no doubt there’d be cameras. Not that they’d stopped him before.

Joe rolled into Saddlestring at 12:30 a.m. and drove straight to the Stockman’s Bar. There were several cars and trucks parked diagonally outside, and he was grateful it was still open. The Coors, Fat Tire, and 90 Shilling neon beer signs lit the small windows on the side. He knew Timberman often shut the place down before 2:00 a.m. if he had no customers or if the drinkers who were still there had stopped drinking.

Joe pulled into a space out front and killed the engine. He recognized a few of the vehicles and was pleased to locate the one he was looking for: a 1992 Ford pickup with a cracked windshield that had primer painted on the top of both rear fenders.