C. Box - Force of Nature

He parked in the trees so his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the highway or from his father’s home. He kept in the timber as he skirted the clearing, getting just close enough to confirm there were fresh tracks in the drive from when the Tahoe had come and gone earlier. He suspected there was a third operator of The Five inside, possibly two, and prayed that Dalisay and the girls had been returned unharmed. The operators were no doubt waiting for the two men in the Tahoe to come back and pick them up after dispatching Nate.

He approached the house from the side, running from tree to tree, keeping low. He had to close a distance of eighty yards from the timber to the siding of the structure. The three windows on the side of the house went to the back bedrooms and the bathroom. All had curtains drawn, but as he made his last desperate sprint to the house over open lawn, he looked up and saw the curtains part on the bathroom window. Nate dropped to a squat and raised his weapon and cocked the hammer in a single move.

The crosshairs through his scope settled on the bridge of his father’s nose as the old man looked out. He was using the toilet and happened to part the curtains while he stood. Nate saw his Dad’s eyes widen in shock and surprise when he saw him.

Nate lowered the gun and raised a single finger to his lips to indicate “Sssshhh.”

His father nodded slightly before looking over his shoulder. Then, apparently satisfied no one was watching, he turned back.

Nate mouthed, “How many?”

His father mouthed, “One.”

“Front or back?”

“Front.”

“I’m going to ring the doorbell,” Nate mouthed, and illustrated by jabbing his pointer finger. He turned his finger on his Dad. “You answer the door.”

Gordo looked back at him blankly for a moment, then nodded that he understood.

Nate kept below the windows as he turned the corner from the side of the house. He approached the porch, then reached through the railing to press the doorbell. When the chime rang inside, he heard a series of sudden footfalls. Light and heavy steps. Meaning there were more inside than his father and the bad guy. Dalisay and the girls? He hoped so.

“Who the hell is that?” an unfamiliar man asked.

“I’ll get it,” he heard Gordon say.

“Stay where you are,” the other man said.

“Who’s here, Mom?” A small girl’s voice. Nate smiled to himself.

Nate heard and felt the sucking sound of the front door opening out. He pressed himself against the siding of the house with his weapon cocked and pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle.

A man’s head poked outside, squinting toward the circular drive. The operator was older than the two men in the Tahoe, but his features were just as hard and rough. Heavy brow, close-cropped hair, zipperlike scar on his cheek, and serious set to his mouth. Another thug. At Nate’s eye level, he recognized the blunt round snout of a flash suppressor mounted on the barrel of a semiautomatic long gun.

The operator sensed something wrong and his head rotated toward the big revolver.

Nate blew it off.

As he holstered his weapon and the shot rang in his ears along with shrieks from inside, he thought: Yarak.

The next morning, Wednesday, outside Saddlestring, Wyoming, Joe Pickett backed his pickup toward the tongue of his stock trailer in the muted dawn light. The glow of his taillights painted the front of the trailer light pink as he tried to inch into position so he could lower the trailer hitch onto the ball jutting out from beneath his rear bumper.

It was a cool fall day, with enough of a wind that the last clinging leaves on the cottonwoods were releasing their grip in yellow/gold waves. It had dropped below freezing during the night and he’d had to break through an inch of ice on the horse trough. Southbound high-altitude V ’s of Canada geese punctuated the rosy day sky, making a racket.

He’d left a message on Luke Brueggemann’s cell phone that it was time to ride the circuit in the mountains and check on those elk camps they hadn’t gotten to earlier. While he bridled Toby to lead him over to the open trailer, he heard a vehicle rumbling up Bighorn Road from town. Hunters, he guessed, headed up into the mountains.

Gravel crunched in front of his house and a door slammed, and he leaned around the corner of the trailer to see who it was. It wouldn’t be unusual for a hunter to stop by to verify hunting area boundaries or make a complaint. But it wasn’t a hunter, it was a sheriff’s department vehicle. Joe caught his groan before it came out.

He stuffed his gloves into his back pocket and walked around the house to the front. Deputy Mike Reed was on his porch, fist raised, about to knock.

“Hey, Mike,” Joe said.

“Joe.”

“You’re out and about early.”

Reed sighed and crammed his hands into the pockets of his too-tight department jacket. “It seems late to me. I’ve been up most of the night.”

Joe frowned. “What’s up?”

“Hell is breaking loose. I was hoping you might offer me a cup of coffee.”

“Sure,” Joe said. “Just let me go inside and check around first. I’ve got one bathroom and three females in there getting ready for work and school in various stages of undress.”

Reed nodded. “I’ve got daughters. I remember what that’s like. I used the lilac bushes on the side of my house for eight years, I think. Maybe you could bring the coffee out here.”

“That would be a better idea,” Joe said, shouldering past the deputy.

They leaned their arms over the top rail of the corral at the opposite sides of the corner post. Each held a steaming cup of coffee and put a single boot up on the bottom rail. When they breathed or talked, small clouds of condensation puffed out and haloed their heads before dissipating.

“Like I said, long night,” Reed said.

“Seems like you want to tell me something.”

“That’s right, Joe.” There was gravity in Reed’s words.

“Then you’d best get to it,” Joe said. “I’ve got horses to load and a trainee to pick up, and if the sheriff or one of his spies sees us out here talking, he’ll think we’re plotting against him.”

Reed barked a laugh. “At this point, he’s probably already convinced of that. At least as far as I’m concerned.”

Joe sipped his coffee and waited.

“Since I’ve worked at the department,” Reed said, “I can’t remember more of a clusterfuck than we’ve got going right now. And the timing! Just a few weeks until the election. I should be kind of happy, I guess, but I almost feel sorry for that idiot of a sheriff right now.”

“Meaning what?” Joe asked.

“Well, the triple homicide, of course,” Reed said. “We’re not getting anywhere on that. We’ve notified the FBI, but we haven’t made a request for assistance. State DCI boys are bumping into each other in the office, but until something breaks, we’ve got nowhere to run with it. Ballistics is inconclusive, other than they were all shot with a big projectile that passed through their bodies and can’t be found. No one’s come forward to link them up, and nobody seems to know anything about why they were in that boat in the first place.”

Joe looked into the top of his coffee cup, because he couldn’t meet Reed’s eyes.

Reed said, “On top of all this, we get a call from Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein. She’s a psychologist from Winchester. You know her?”

Joe shook his head no.

“She’s… interesting. Anyway, this psychologist was in a house with a man named Bad Bob Whiteplume out on the res.”

“I know Bob,” Joe said, looking up.

“Anyway, according to this Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein, she was staying over with Bad Bob at his place Monday night and someone started honking their horn outside about three-thirty in the morning and wouldn’t stop. Bad Bob went outside to see what the problem was in his bathrobe and never came back. She thinks something might have happened to him and she’s raising hell with the sheriff to start a search.”