C. Box - Free Fire

“I said I was going out. No, okay. It’s okay, I thought you were asking-”

“No.”

“We saw all the sights, I guess. Some big canyons, some trees, a bunch of geysers. Old Faithful. Way too many fat peoplein shorts. I think Yellowstone ought to have some kind of fitnesstest you have to pass to get in. I mean, gross.”

“Did you go to a place called Sunburst Hot Springs?” Joe asked casually.

“Hmmm, I’m trying to remember the name.”

“Did you go hot-potting there?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sunburst. That was actually kind of a cool place. Except it’s illegal, you know. They keep you from going to the really cool places.”

“Okay,” Joe said, “I’m going to ask you a question but beforeyou answer I want you to know that however you answer it, you will not be incriminated in any way.”

“Huh?”

“Was Hoening involved with drugs? I’m not asking about you, I’m asking about him.”

She seemed relieved and said, “Alcohol only. But lots of it. He was really backward in his thinking. I couldn’t get him to. . never mind.”

“So he never used drugs in your presence?”

“Alcohol. It’s a drug, you know.”

“Then can you tell me what he meant when he wrote to you”-Joe fished out the e-mail-“ ‘We’ll have some cocktails and laughs, watch the sun set over Yellowstone Lake, go hot-pottingand light a couple of flamers .’ ”

“Ooooh,” she said, enthusiasm gushing for the first time, “those things were the coolest of all! Flamers, yeah. They were, like, great .”

Two point two million acres, Joe thought. Yellowstone was that big. And while he now had a plan, he didn’t have a car.

There was a layer of light snow suspended on the grass and melting on the pavement in front of the Mammoth Hotel. He could see his breath as he walked to the restaurant for breakfast. The morning was achingly silent. Rising columns of steam from the hot spring terraces on the hill muted the sun, making it seem overcast despite the cloudless blue sky. Although it could, and did, snow any month of the year in the park, it definitely felt like summer was spent and had stepped aside in utter exhaustionto yield to fall and winter.

His mind was on something else, though.

Flamers, they called them.

Like the snowflakes that hung in the air, turning into floating sparks by the morning sun, thoughts and facts seemed suspendedtoo. While it might be folly to try to connect them, Joe felt the need to try. It was more of a hunch than a theory, and he’d made mistakes going with his hunches before. But somehowit felt right. It was the new knowledge of the flamers that did it.

Flamers. The Gopher State Five. Clay McCann. Sunburst Hot Springs. Bob Olig. The black SUV. What Mark Cutler figuredout but never got a chance to explain. And now Clay McCannagain, with more blood on his hands. Somehow, they were all connected.

Samantha Ellerby had described flamers as streams of gas coming from tiny quarter-sized holes in the ground that could be lit with a match. She said the flame reached at least six feet into the air, sometimes higher, and provided both heat and light for hot-potting. She said there were at least seven of them near Sunburst Hot Springs, and when they were all lit up at night surroundingthe hot pool the atmosphere was “way cool.” She said when it was time to leave, Hoening smothered the flames by covering the holes with a thick wet blanket.

The Zone of Death was a diversion, he thought. This wasn’t about the Zone of Death at all. The murders were a means to an end, a way of dealing with those facts that hung in the air and were somehow, some way, connected.

He hoped that a revelation would come to him while he ate breakfast, that the indiscriminate facts would somehow connect and cling to one another, form a pattern, create a story line.

They didn’t.

When simon said there were no messages for him at the front desk, Joe used the pay phone in the lobby to call Chuck Ward. He needed to know what the governor thought of his reportsthus far and how he could get a new vehicle, and he wanted to advise them of the new information about Cutler, flamers, and Clay McCann’s latest crime.

Ward wasn’t in.

“Can you tell me how to get ahold of him?” Joe asked the secretary in the governor’s office.

“No. He took a few days’ personal leave.”

“Personal leave? Now?”

“Yes.”

Joe was annoyed. This meant Ward hadn’t received his reportsand had no idea what was happening.

“When will he be back?”

“Monday.”

“That’s three more days!”

“Correct.” She sounded bored.

Joe tried to think. There was no way Ward would be out of touch completely. He was the governor’s chief of staff, he couldn’t just vanish. It didn’t work that way. He knew the secretaryprobably couldn’t give out Ward’s number, wherever he was. But he knew who could.

“I need to talk to the governor, then. It’s important.”

“What did you say your name was?” she asked before puttinghim on hold.

Joe waited. The hold music was Johnny Cash singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Joe assumed the governor had had somethingto do with the choice.

Finally, she came back on the line. “The governor says he’s never heard of anyone named Joe Pickett.”

Joe clenched his jaw, closed his eyes, said, “It’s so good to be back in the system. Please have Chuck Ward call me immediatelyif he happens to check in. And please tell the governor things are happening. Three more people are dead. I’m sure he’s heard about them-two murdered by Clay McCann, the other a Zephyr employee who we made contact with. That one might be an accident but I doubt it.”

“I’ll pass that along,” she said in a tone suggesting she had no intention of doing so.

“He’ll be interested,” Joe said. “Trust me on that.”

“Hmmmppf.”

Joe walked to the Pagoda, stepping through a television news crew from Billings that was setting up in the parking lot at the side of the building. A pretty blond correspondent who looked all of twenty-four was applying makeup to her sharp cheekbones, ready to do a stand-up report on the fact that Clay McCann was back in the Yellowstone jail.

The receptionist looked up as Joe entered. Layborn sat in a chair behind her, and he shook his head with clear disgust when he saw Joe.

“Thanks to you,” Layborn said, “I get to spend the morning fending off the press instead of doing my job.”

Joe ignored him. “Did you find anything out about the black SUV?”

“You mean the one you didn’t get a plate number on? No. It was probably out of the park by the time we put out the APB at all the gates.”

“But you’ve alerted the cops in all of the gateways, right? Jackson, Cody, West Yellowstone, Bozeman, Cooke City?”

“Gee,” Layborn said, curling his lip, “we never even thought of that. Good thing you’re here to advise us.” He snorted, “Of course we did that. Christ. But we’ve got nothing so far. Do you know how many SUVs there are in this area? Everybody has ’em.”

Joe nodded. True. “So McCann is here again, huh? Are charges being filed?”

Layborn looked quickly away. Joe could see that the ranger’s face and neck were turning red. “We’re holding him while the prosecutors try to come up with something,” he said through clenched teeth. “This time, we can’t even get him on a gun charge, since he claims the victims had the gun and he took it away from them in self-defense. That son of a bitch is going to get away with it. Again! ” he spat the word out.

“So he’ll be released?” Joe asked, incredulous.

Layborn shifted in his chair, finally looked back at Joe. “We had to tell him this morning he could go.”