C Box - In Plain Sight

AFTER FEEDING NATE Romanowski’s falcons after school, Joe took Julie and Sheridan to the Thunderhead Ranch so Julie could go home. As they drove down the road they were met by a yellow Ford coming the other way. There was something familiar about the driver, Joe thought, something about the pinched, hard look to his face that triggered a sour familiarity, but Joe couldn’t place it. Unlike most people on a back road, the driver didn’t wave or stop. In his rearview mirror Joe watched the yellow Ford drive off.

“Who was that?” he asked Julie.

She shrugged. “It wasn’t one of our trucks.”

As they neared the ranch house, Julie said to Sheridan, “Did you ask yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Ask what?” Joe said, turning his attention to the girls but still suspicious about the Ford.

Sheridan turned to Joe. “Is it okay to do a sleepover at Julie’s in a couple of weeks?”

Sleepovers were all the rage among the eighth-graders, Joe knew. Scarcely a weekend went by without an invitation to Sheridan to sleep over at someone’s house, along with five or six other girls. It was a group thing, a pack thing, and Joe was helpless before it. He gratefully turned over all planning and coordination to Marybeth. Marybeth rued the change in her oldest daughter from preferring the company of her family to the company of her friends.

Joe said, “Why are you asking me?”

“Because Mom may not let me,” Sheridan admitted.

This was not a place Joe wanted to go. “We’ll have to discuss it later.”

“Come on, Dad…”

He hated when she did that, since his inclination, always, was to give in. Sheridan had the ability to rope him in with such ease that even he was shamed by it.

“Later,” he said.

“I’ll call you,” Sheridan sighed to her friend, patting Julie on the arm. Julie gave Joe a pleading look, and he shrugged as if to say, It’s out of my hands.

THE NEXT WEEK, JOE WAS ON A MUDDY TWO-TRACK IN the breaklands doing a preliminary trend count on the mule-deer population when he got the distinct feeling he was being watched. It was a crisp, dry morning. A late-spring snowfall was melting into the inch-high grass as the morning warmed, and the moisture was being sucked into the parched earth. By late afternoon, he was afraid, the ground would be as bone-dry as it had been all year. It would take much more rain and snow to turn back the relentless slow death of the soil caused by the fifth straight year of drought.

He had been counting pregnant does all morning. Most of the fawns wouldn’t be born until June, but from what he could tell so far it would be another bad year for the deer population. A good year could be predicted if there were eighty fawns per one hundred does, or 80 percent. So far, the ratio had been 40 percent pregnant does. The drought-not hunting or development-was severely affecting the population. He would need to recommend fewer deer licenses for the area, which would not make him very popular among the local hunters.

Joe surveyed the horizon to see if he could spot who was watching him. He saw no one, and shrugged it off.

His cell phone rang.

“Guess who this is?” said Special Agent Tony Portenson of the FBI.

Portenson was originally from Brooklyn, and his accent, if anything, had become more pronounced the longer he was stationed in the Wyoming field office.

“Hello, Tony. Where are you?”

“I’m in your town.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Joe said, knowing Portenson had been trying for three years to get a transfer out of the West to someplace more exciting, someplace where there were gangsters and organized crime, maybe even terrorists. Over the years, Portenson had bored Joe for hours with his complaints regarding the poor quality of crime he had to deal with out of his office in Cheyenne: cattle rustling, methamphetamine labs, murders of passion on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Portenson asked.

“I’m out in the field counting deer.”

“Jesus, I wouldn’t want to interrupt that. ”

Joe could hear Portenson turn to someone, probably his partner, partially cover his phone, and say, “The guy is counting deer. No shit. Counting deer. ”

“I’m counting antelope too,” Joe said.

“They can wait. They aren’t going anywhere, I’m sure.”

“The pronghorn antelope is the second-fastest mammal on the face of the earth,” Joe said. “So that wouldn’t be correct.”

“I’m at that place with the corny name,” Portenson said. “The Burg-O-Pardner. Meet me in ten minutes.”

“It’ll take me twenty.”

“I’ll order breakfast in the meantime.”

TONY PORTENSON WAS sitting in a booth in the back of the restaurant when Joe entered. He looked up from his plate of biscuits, gravy, and bacon and waved Joe back. Portenson was dark, intense, and had close-set eyes and a scar that hitched up his upper lip so that it looked as if he was always sneering. When he smiled, the effect was worse. Sitting across from him was an earnest, fresh-faced, wide-shouldered younger man with buzz-cut hair. His partner, Joe assumed.

“Have a seat, Joe,” Portenson said, standing and offering his hand. “This is Special Agent Gary Child.”

Rather than sit with Portenson or Child, Joe retrieved a chair from a nearby table and pulled it over.

Portenson wore standard FBI clothing-tie, jacket, and slacks, which made him stand out in Saddlestring as if he were wearing a space suit.

“This is the guy I was telling you about,” Portenson said to Child.

Child nodded and looked at Joe with a mix of admiration and disdain. The FBI had a low opinion of local law enforcement that was so ingrained it was institutionalized. Although Joe operated on the margin of the sheriff’s department and was rarely involved with the town cops, he was considered local and therefore less than proficient. Portenson had obviously briefed Child on both cases they’d been involved in before, probably between complaints about the wind and the snow he had to put up with during his long assignment in Wyoming, Joe thought.

“So,” Portenson said as they all sat back down. “What is the fastest mammal?”

“The cheetah,” Joe said.

“Does that mean a cheetah can chase down a pronghorn antelope?”

“Conceivably,” Joe said, “if they lived on the same continent. But they don’t.”

“Hmmpf.”

“What brings you up here, Tony?” Joe asked, assuming it would be either about the Scarletts or…

“Have you seen your buddy Nate Romanowski lately?” Portenson asked, getting right to it.

Joe felt a tingle on the back of his neck. “No.”

“You’re telling me he just vanished from the face of the earth?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I hadn’t seen him. And before you ask, no, I also haven’t heard from him.”

Portenson exchanged glances with Child.

Child said, “Let me set the scene. Two men are murdered. Although the condition of their bodies is deteriorated almost beyond recognition, the theory of our medical examiner is that they were each killed by a single gunshot wound to the head from an extremely large-caliber handgun. The bodies were obviously moved from where they were killed. Meanwhile, your friend Nate Romanowski was known to pack a.454 Casull revolver and was at odds with at least one of the murdered men. And according to you, he just vanished?”

Joe stifled a smile. “I have a tough time envisioning Tony here as the good cop in the good cop/bad cop scenario,” he said. “This is more like bad cop/worse cop. Is this a new FBI strategy, or what?”

Child didn’t waver. “We could bring you back for questioning.”