C. Box - Force of Nature

It took two minutes for Trucker Cap to kick his way outside.

Trucker Cap crawled out into the snow on his hands and knees. His face and clothing were covered in blood, and it took him a few seconds to realize headlights were on him, and that Nate stood between the headlights of the Jeep with his gun out.

“Oh, fuck me,” Trucker Cap said. “I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there. His head just… blew up.”

Nate kept his eyes on Trucker Cap as he called over his shoulder, “Stay down, Haley.”

From behind him, he heard her say indignantly, “I’m not a dog.”

He ignored her and gestured with the muzzle of his gun toward Trucker Cap. “Don’t move.”

“Are you the guy?” Trucker Cap asked. His voice was thick with shock as he stumbled to his feet. “Are you the guy who did this?”

Nate could see his bright teeth through the gore on his face.

“I told you not to move,” Nate said, and lowered his revolver and blew Trucker Cap’s right knee away. The man shrieked and fell straight down in a heap, moaning and writhing in the snow.

“You’re going to answer a couple of questions,” Nate said, approaching the wounded man, hoping Haley had obeyed and wasn’t watching what was going to happen from the Jeep behind him. “I’m not asking you to answer questions,” he said. “I’m telling you what’s going to happen.”

Trucker Cap groaned from pain and rolled to his back. He grasped his shattered knee with both hands, and blood pulsed out from between his fingers.

“You should have known this was coming when you went after my friends,” Nate said.

Nate thought of what Haley had said earlier: Like I haven’t seen ugly.

He quickly closed the gap to the man and rolled him over with his boot. As he did, Trucker Cap’s jacket hiked up and Nate saw the grip of a. 45 Heckler amp; Koch semiauto tucked into this belt. He snatched it out and tossed it over the top of the Tahoe.

“Any more weapons?”

“God, no,” Trucker Cap moaned. His eyes were closed tightly.

Nate dropped to one knee next to Trucker Cap and patted the man down with his free hand through his clothes. His hand came away sticky with blood, and he wiped it clean in the snow before reaching back and gripping Trucker Cap’s left ear. He gave it a vicious twist, and the man’s eyes shot open.

“I’m going to bleed out,” the man said.

“And what’s the downside?” Nate asked. Then: “Three things, or I rip your ear off.”

Trucker Cap’s eyes narrowed on Nate’s face.

“One: how many operatives were on your team? Two: why is Nemecek coming after me now?”

Trucker Cap’s mouth twisted into a defiant leer. “Why should I tell you? I heard what you did over there, you fucking traitor. When he gave us a chance to come after you, we jumped on it, you son-of-a-bitch.”

Nate ripped his ear off and tossed it over his shoulder like an apple core. Trucker Cap howled, and Nate waited for the man to catch his breath. While he did, he reached across the man’s face and grasped his other ear.

Nate said, “Everything Nemecek told you is wrong, but it doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t have the time or inclination to convince you otherwise. But now I know how he convinced good men to go rogue with him. Now back to the three things…”

Trucker Cap said, “But you only asked two.”

“Oh,” Nate said, “the third. I want you to make a call when we’re done here. If you do exactly what I say, you might survive this. If you don’t, I’m going to pull you apart with my bare hands until you’re begging me to kill you. Got that?”

Nate became aware that Haley must have watched, because behind him he could hear her sobbing.

At the same time, 360 miles to the east, Marybeth Pickett left her counter at the library, walked back behind the new acquisitions display to the business office, and picked up the hand microphone and made an announcement: “The library will close in ten minutes.”

As she cradled the mic, her own voice echoed through the near-empty building and sounded severe and tinny. The acoustics in the old building were awful. To complete the protocol for closing the building, she doused the lights and quickly turned them back on so patrons who were wrapped up in whatever they were doing-or wearing earbuds-would get the word. It was 8:50 p.m.

She didn’t like closing the building at night and wished she hadn’t made a deal with the other senior librarian to switch shifts. Part of the negotiations for coming back to work was her insistence that her shift conclude by three so she could be home when the girls got out of school. But once a month or so, she traded shifts for the sole reason of maintaining a good working relationship with her colleagues.

Both Lucy and April were at home-they’d sent texts asking if they could heat up some frozen pizza-and Joe was still out in the field and hadn’t communicated his whereabouts or when he’d be getting back to their house on Bighorn Road. She was anxious to hear from him how the multiple investigations were going. Three homicides and three missing-persons cases within the span of a week had unnerved every local she’d talked with. Things like that didn’t happen here, she knew, and never all at once. Although someone driving through the town of Saddlestring would see a sleepy community hugging the banks of the Twelve Sleep River as winter approached, they would have no idea that the people who lived there were filled with anxiety and it felt on the streets and in the shops like the wheels were coming off the place. The weekly Saddlestring Roundup had a story in it just that day featuring residents who said they were openly carrying weapons and locking their doors at night for the first time in their lives.

The pressure growing on Sheriff Kyle McLanahan to restore order was immense and more than a little unreasonable, she thought. Locals directed a hefty part of their fear and frustration toward him, and talked about the incompetence of the department. Several of the small business leaders who gathered for morning coffee at the Burg-O-Pardner-Marybeth’s former clients who were struggling in the down economy and barely holding on as it was-discussed circulating a recall petition for McLanahan if he somehow won reelection. Although she’d never liked McLanahan and wanted him to lose, Marybeth thought most of the criticism recently to be over the top and unfair. Though, she thought, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

The old county library was a wholly different place at night, Marybeth thought. It was an original Carnegie library built in the 1920s, and added on to. Outside, the classical Greek architecture, columns, and scrollwork were impressive in the floodlights that shone back on it. But inside, the high ceilings and corners weren’t lit well, and sounds carried in odd ways, like her announcement had. It was too cool in the winter and too warm in the summer, and the ancient boiler sometimes shuddered with enough force to rattle the windows and scare children in the children’s section. At night, the original hardwood floor produced moans and squeaks she never heard in the daytime. The layout of the building was outmoded and crowded, with high shelving that prevented her from seeing who was at the study tables or reading area in the back of the building from her counter.

Outside, clouds had been drawn over the moon and stars. She could see from the wet windows it was spitting snow. The valley was due for the first serious winter storm of the season, and she hoped it didn’t roll in until later that night, after she was home safely. After Joe was home safely. The closeness outside and the water-streaked windows added to the overall gloom of the building-and her mood.