C Box - Below Zero

Worse: they’d lost sight of Stenko’s car.

The terrain was rolling hills and shallow arroyos, as if the high plains were severely wrinkled. Every time Joe topped a hill, they looked into the distance for red taillights before plunging back down into a low spot. Although there were plenty of static white lights on distant oil wells, there appeared to be no other traffic on the highway.

As they shot past gravel service roads that cut to the right and left of the highway, Joe and Sheridan tried to peer out into the murk for a glimpse of the car. As the minutes went by, Joe knew the odds of finding Stenko’s car were tumbling. There were so many ways for them to get lost at night in terrain like this-taking an unexpected service road, pulling so far ahead that Joe simply couldn’t see a vehicle, or simply pulling off the highway into the shadows of a depression and turning off their lights. If Stenko suspected Joe was chasing him-he could have easily seen Joe’s headlights on top of the rise-he could be making evasive maneuvers.

Joe scanned the night sky for a glimpse of the FBI helicopter and wondered how many minutes away from the Pumpkin Buttes it was…

“I just saw car lights!” Sheridan shouted, her face pressed to the passenger-side window. “Back there-we went right past them.”

Joe slowed and craned around, trying to confirm what she’d seen. They’d shot by at least two gravel exits on the right. Stenko could have taken either of them.

“Where?” Joe asked, slamming the truck into reverse.

“Out there,” Sheridan said, opening her window and waving generally to the west. “I saw taillights way out there, I swear…”

He nearly backed off the highway from going too fast, but he corrected the wheel and stayed on the pavement. Then he saw something on the second access road-an almost imperceptible roll of dust that lit up in the headlamps. He never would have seen the dust as they sped by, but in his brights the settling dust bloomed like a wilting flower in the road.

“They took this one,” he said. “See the dust in the air?”

“Yeah…”

He shut the lights off, and the gravel road vanished into darkness.

“Hey,” she said. “How are we going to follow them in the dark?”

“An old Indian trick,” Joe said while he reached under the dashboard and found the toggle switch for his sneak lights and turned them on. The sneak lights threw an orb of light down from under his front bumper into a pool immediately in front of the pickup. It was enough light to see to drive but because the beams pointed down into the dirt they were difficult to see from a distance. The sneak switch also disabled the taillights and brake lights, so that if he slowed or stopped, there would be no indication from flashing red.

“Hey,” Sheridan said, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I’ve caught a lot of game violators over the years using these to follow vehicles or sneak up on poachers,” he said. “I’m sure Stenko probably saw us earlier when we were coming down that rough road with the brights on. But he’ll assume we went on down the highway, which is probably why he turned off here.”

“Cool,” she said. “How come you didn’t ever tell me about these spy lights?”

Joe said, “I keep some of my tricks in reserve. There are lots of tricks you don’t know about. You know, in case you ever decide to break any Game and Fish laws and I have to arrest you.”

“Very funny,” she said. “You’d never arrest your own daughter.”

“You know I would,” Joe said.

She sighed, said, “Yeah, I guess you probably would. But Mom would be mad at you.”

He smiled and reached over and squeezed her shoulder. Then he shoved the pickup into drive and turned off the highway onto the unpaved road. The truck vibrated and shook as it had before as his tires ground over egg-sized gravel.

Sheridan said what Joe was thinking: “So what do we do if we catch them on this crappy road?” she asked.

Joe said, “I’m not sure.”

He could feel her staring at him, waiting for a better answer. But she wouldn’t get one. He didn’t dare approach Stenko’s vehicle too aggressively with Sheridan in his pickup and April with Stenko. The chance for a confrontation would be too great and he couldn’t risk their lives. He was sure Sheridan would object so he didn’t even want to discuss it with her.

He said, “We’re going to maintain visual contact,” Joe said. “That’s all for now.”

Sheridan didn’t respond. He glanced over to see her furiously tapping a message on her phone.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m asking April what’s going on.”

“What if she can’t answer?”

“Then she won’t,” Sheridan said, testy. “But if her phone’s on like that man told us, maybe she’ll get the text from me. She might be able to respond when Stenko or Robert aren’t paying attention.”

“So what are you sending her?” Joe asked.

“I’m asking her if they know we’re back here.”

Joe nodded. “It would be interesting to know that.”

“Yeah, and she can text back with just a ‘Y’ or an ‘N.’ Easy.”

Because the sneak lights drastically cut down on his field of vision, Joe proceeded much slower than he would have preferred. He hoped that if Stenko saw no headlights in his rearview mirror, he’d have no reason to try and outrace him. He might even slow down or pull over to regroup. Joe and Sheridan topped a rise, and Joe saw the taillights ahead in the distance less than a mile away.

“There they are,” he said. He couldn’t judge if Stenko had slowed or not before they plunged down into a hollow.

Halfway up the next incline, Sheridan’s phone lit up and buzzed. Joe felt his stomach clench: April was responding.

Sheridan read the message in silence and lowered the phone to her lap. When Joe looked over for clarification he could see moisture rimming her eyes.

“What did she say?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“She said something bad,” Sheridan said, her mouth twisting into a pucker as if she was about to cry.

“What?”

“She said, ‘Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’ ”

Joe nearly drove off the road. He didn’t know if he was more shocked by what April had written or the fact that Sheridan repeated it verbatim.

“Maybe somebody took her phone away from her and is using it to answer me,” Sheridan said weakly, turning her head away.

And Joe was instantly enraged at the idea of April-or whoever-talking to his daughter like that and he thought: Things are going to get real Western here in a minute.

IT WAS A CAR CHASE in slow motion: Joe fuming and driving under the duel handicaps of his anger and his sneak lights while the vehicle he was following ground on a half-mile ahead on the rough gravel road. Although they could only see Stenko’s vehicle in short glimpses as they drove on the tops of rolling hills or Stenko did, Joe started to discern that Stenko (or Robert) was driving erratically-racing ahead, sagging back, taking stretches of the road too fast and other stretches with ridiculous caution. He’d also noticed tire tracks meandering off the gravel road to both the right and left before correcting.

His mind raced with scenarios to fit the facts as he knew them. The scenarios made his heart race, and he didn’t want to share them with his daughter. She was smart, though, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she was making the same speculations as well.

Was the driver injured or hurt, he wondered? Was there a fight going on inside the car, causing the driver to veer off the road and over-correct? And he thought about that message Sheridan had received and he knew that whoever had sent it-whether it was a suddenly hostile April or someone who’d taken her phone away from her-the situation had changed drastically from what it was. He could only guess where it would lead, and he found it hard to imagine a narrative in which April would be perfectly safe.