C. Box - Free Fire

“I seen you coming half a mile away,” the man said, stepping out from behind the tree but keeping the rifle leveled. “I was in the trees taking a shit when you showed up.”

He was short, stout, mid-thirties, with a blocky head, wide nose flattened to his face, dirt on his hands. His eyes sparkled with menace. Behind him, in the shadows of the timber, Joe now saw a crude lean-to shelter, a skinned and half-dismembereddeer hanging from a cross-pole lashed to tree trunks. A survivalist, living off the land in a place with no law.

“You need to lower the weapon,” Demming said, her voice calmer than Joe thought his would be at that moment. “Let’s talk this over before you get yourself into any more trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” he said. “There ain’t nothing you can do to me here.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Demming said.

“Sure it does,” he said, and showed a tight smile. He was missing teeth on both top and bottom. “It worked for Clay McCann.”

Joe and Demming exchanged a quick glance.

“I wrote him a letter but he never answered,” the man said. Joe tried to determine the man’s accent. His words were flat and hard. Midwestern, Joe guessed.

“Where you from?” Joe asked. “Nebraska?”

“Iowa.”

“You’re a long way from home.”

The Iowan looked hard at Joe for the first time and narrowed his eyes. “This is my home. And you two are trespassing. And the way I got it figured, I could shoot you both right now and walk ’cause no court can try me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Demming said. “How long have you been here?”

“Month.”

“Then you don’t know that Congress passed a law,” Demmingsaid. “You’re now in the Idaho district. This is no longer off the map.”

Joe admired Demming’s quick thinking. The lie sounded credible. It produced a flicker of doubt in the Iowan’s eyes and the muzzle of his rifle dropped a few inches.

“Let us leave,” Demming said, “and no harm will come to you. There was no way you could have known.”

“They really passed a law?” he asked.

Demming nodded. Joe nodded.

“And the president signed it?”

“Yes.”

The Iowan looked from Demming to Joe and back, digging for a clue either way. Joe hoped his face wouldn’t reveal anything.Seconds ticked by. A bald eagle skimmed the surface of the lake and just missed plucking a fish out.

“Naw,” the Iowan said, raising the rifle butt back to his shoulder,“I don’t believe you. If that was the case there would have been some rangers patrolling out here, and I ain’t seen nobody.”

The heavy boom, an explosion of blood and fingers on the forestock, and the rifle kicking out of the Iowan’s hands happenedsimultaneously and left the wounded man standing there empty-handed and wide-eyed.

Demming screamed, Joe froze.

Another shot took the Iowan’s nose and part of his cheek-boneoff his face. When he instinctively reached up with his now-shattered left hand, a bullet ripped through the back of his camo trousers at knee level, no doubt slicing through tendons, collapsing him backward into the grass like a puppet with strings clipped.

Joe saw movement on his left in his peripheral vision, a flash of clothing darting from the reeds along the shoreline into the cover of the trees. He fumbled for his weapon, racked the slide, trained it on the writhing, moaning Iowan as Demming retrievedher pistol.

He approached the Iowan and squatted, patting down the man and finding a.44 revolver, bear spray, and the half-gnawed leg bone of the deer. He tossed them aside, adrenaline and the aftereffects of fear coursing through him. The leg plopped fifteenfeet out into the lake.

He heard Demming shout into her radio, telling the ranger back at the station to call in a helicopter for an airlift to Idaho Falls before the man bled out.

“Is he going to make it?” she asked Joe, her eyes wide, her hands trembling so badly she couldn’t seat the radio back into its case on her belt. She glanced nervously in the direction the shots had been fired.

“I think so,” Joe said, grimacing at the Iowan’s split and disfigured face and the pool of bright red blood forming in the grass behind his knees. “We can tie his legs off with tourniquets and bind his hand and face to stop the bleeding,” he said, taking off his shirt to tear into strips.

“What happened?” the Iowan croaked, mouth full of blood, shock setting in. “Who did this to me?”

Joe didn’t recognize the flash of clothing, but the marksmanshipwas familiar.

“His name’s Nate Romanowski,” Joe said.

“Who?” Demming asked.

“Friend of mine,” Joe said to the Iowan. “If he wanted to hit you in the head and kill you, you wouldn’t be talking right now.”

“How long ago were they here?” Clay McCann asked Sheila while picking up the business cards. He was agitated.

“I don’t know-three hours, maybe.”

“What did they want?”

“Gee, Clay,” she said, rolling her eyes, “maybe they wanted to ask you about shooting four people dead.”

Annoyed, he looked up at her from the cards. He recognized the woman’s name-Demming. She was one of the first on the scene at Bechler. She was no heavy hitter within the park, he knew that. Nothing special. But. . a game warden ?

Sheila looked back at him with insolence. She was a poor fill-in for the receptionist who quit. Too much attitude, too much mouth. He wanted to tell her to tone down her act or he’d lose what few clients he still had. Then his focus changed from Sheila to the open door behind her, to the credenza and the notebooks that were clearly displayed on his desk.

“Why is my door open?” he asked, his voice cold.

“I wanted some light out here so I could read,” she said defensively.“If you haven’t noticed, it’s dark in here. You need to replace some bulbs. And there’s a nice big window in your office that lets in the light. Besides, the room needed airing out.”

He glared at her. It wouldn’t take much to drag her out from behind the desk by her hair. “Did they go into my office?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“Did you?”

“Just to open the door and the curtains. I told you that. Jesus, calm down.”

“Did either of them look into my office?”

She glared back. “No. What’s your problem, anyway?”

Instead of answering, he strode around her desk into his room. Shutting the door, he said, “Keep it closed.”

She knocked softly on the door. “Clay, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

Actually, everything was wrong.

He sat heavily in his chair and rubbed his face and scalp with both hands, stared at his desk without really seeing it.

Everything was wrong. He tried not to think he’d been played. He was the player, not the playee, after all, right?

But the money still hadn’t been wired. The banker was gettingruder each time he called, and had even insinuated that morning that “perhaps Mr. McCann should consider another financialinstitution, one more enthusiastic about such a small deposit,one that would be more in tune to servicing such a meager balance. Maybe one in the States?”

The banker had turned McCann from an angry customer demandinganswers into a pitiful two-bit wannabe, begging for just a few more days of patience. The money would be wired, he assured the banker. He guaranteed it, knowing the value of his word, like his big talk months before, was being devalued by the day.

Even worse was that the man who was supposed to deposit the funds wouldn’t take his call. McCann couldn’t get past the secretary. How could this be?