C Box - Below Zero

“Pick her up and we’ll stay with the vehicle,” Coon said.

Sheridan shouted, “Oh, no! I hope she’s okay!”

Joe slowed down, hit his high beams, and cut the sneak lights. The scrub brush obscured where she’d landed. She’d not gotten up. Sheridan unbuckled her seat belt and shinnied halfway out of her open window, shouting, “April! It’s me, Sheridan! Are you okay? April!”

Joe heard the pop-pop-pop of additional shots up ahead as Stenko or Robert fired wildly again at the helicopter, but he didn’t look up. April was somewhere in the brush, possibly hurt, possibly dead.

The automatic weapons in the helicopter opened up and the sound was like twin buzz saws. Joe looked up to see angry streams of tracers pouring from the chopper into the SUV, raking it from hood to tailgate. Windows exploded and pellets of glass cascaded like droplets from a splash in a lake. The SUV lurched forward until one of the wheels dropped into a badger hole, where it stopped abruptly and rocked. Plumes of radiator fluid rose from the undercarriage. The helicopter hovered, looking for signs of life, before slowly descending and kicking up dust.

“Dad!” Sheridan shouted, pointing to a thin figure rising from the brush like a specter. Joe braked and swung his hand spotlight in the direction Sheridan was pointing.

The woman was thin with scraggly blond hair, hollow cheeks, and haunted eyes. She wore an open flannel shirt that hung from her skeletal frame over a stained white tank top. She held her hands up and grimaced. Her open mouth revealed missing teeth. Even at that distance Joe knew a meth addict when he saw one. Sheridan slid back into the cab. Disappointed and confused, she said, “Who is she ?” Then: “Oh my God, Dad, was April in the car?”

“I don’t think so,” Joe said, watching the skids of the chopper kiss the top of brush as it settled to earth. “I think April’s long gone.”

“Then what’s going on? Why did those men in the helicopter say it was April’s phone?”

Joe said, “Because it probably is.”

ACCORDING TO A DRIVER’S LICENSE FOUND IN HIS BLOODY hip pocket, the body in the SUV belonged to one Francis “Bo” Skelton, thirty-four, of Moorcroft, Wyoming. A call via SALECS to dispatch in Cheyenne revealed Skelton had a significant rap sheet including multiple arrests for possession of methamphetamine, marijuana, and crack cocaine as well as one arrest for B &E that was withdrawn by the Crook County prosecutor when Skelton agreed to cooperate with authorities. Local law enforcement, who had been waiting in vain at the I-90 roadblock, knew Skelton as a rounder and informant who was working with a joint local/state task force to infiltrate methamphetamine traffic in northeastern Wyoming. When not doing drugs or informing, Skelton ran parts for oil well and gas supply companies based in Gillette.

The girlfriend of the deceased, Cyndi Rae Mote, thirty-eight, sat on Joe’s pickup tailgate with a blanket wrapped around her to ward off the predawn chill. It didn’t help much because the few teeth she had still chattered. She told Joe she’d ridden to the Savageton Bar that evening and they stayed until last call. As they left the bar she said the “alcohol caught up with her” and she staggered to a garbage barrel in the parking lot to throw up. The effort knocked her over and she was scrambling on all fours to get back on her feet when she found the cell phone in a stand of weeds.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It looked like a perfectly good phone. I was gonna turn it in to Badger in case someone wanted to claim it…”

Joe said, “Badger?”

“The manager. He’s the bartender, too.”

Joe scribbled the name into his notebook, even though he had his mini-cassette tape recorder running in his breast pocket for backup. “Do you have a last name?”

“Mote,” she said, spelling it: “M-O-T-E.”

“Not yours,” Joe said patiently. “Badger’s.”

“Oh. No, I guess not.”

Joe thought, Badger should be easy to find. He glanced up to locate Agents Portenson and Coon, to see if he should call them in to participate in his interview with Cyndi Mote. He found them both where he expected them to be. Coon was circling the SUV with his flashlight, looking at the damage he’d helped inflict. Joe thought, When Coon was talking to Joe the evening before from his kitchen table with his son chattering at him, neither one of them could have imagined how the night would end. Joe felt bad for Coon. He knew Coon to be tightly wound but professional, basically good-hearted and honest. He doubted Coon had ever drawn his service weapon before, much less brandished an AR-15 with laser sights. Joe could only imagine what was going through his mind now that they’d confirmed that the entire incident, which resulted in a dead body, was all predicated on an error.

Meanwhile, Portenson was in the bubble of the helicopter making and taking calls. In a situation like this, Joe thought, raw priorities were revealed without pretense. While Coon was pensive, reflecting on what he’d done, Portenson was reaching out to people who could help bolster his case and save his job. Joe looked back to Cyndi Mote, assessing her. “Go ahead,” he said.

She said, “Anyway, I was gonna turn it in but Bo looked at it and said it was one of those cheap-ass phones like the ones you get at Wal-Mart. He said somebody probably used it up and threw it away.

“He was right. When I turned it on the battery light was flashing,” she said, “but I figured I’d get as many calls out of it as I could before it died.”

Her version confirmed Coon’s claim that the phone was being used to make other calls. It also explained the Wyoming area code and why the FBI hadn’t instantly tracked down the phone number to a specific user. April had been using a TracFone that could be purchased anywhere, loaded with minutes from a calling card, and used like any phone. It was a favorite among those who didn’t want or like long-term phone contracts, monthly bills, or the bells and whistles that came with more expensive phones. It was also the phone of choice among dealers and gangsters and others who didn’t want to be pinned down or tracked, and it came with a kind of temporary anonymity since the number assigned to the phone wasn’t assigned to a person but to the phone itself. But why had she thrown it away instead of recharging it or ordering more minutes? It didn’t make sense. Joe asked, “Who’d you call?”

She grimaced again. Her lips peeled back and her eyes narrowed into slits. Joe realized it was actually her smile.

“I called every ex-boyfriend whose phone number I could remember and told them they were full of shit,” she said, grinning/ grimacing.

“Do you still have the phone?” Joe asked, thinking they better check the call log to make sure it was the same phone April had used.

“I don’t know where it is,” Cyndi said, chewing on her nails. Joe saw that her nails were gnawed to the nub and bleeding. “It’s probably somewhere in Bo’s pickup. It’s probably shot up all to hell, like poor Bo.”

Joe said, “Why did Bo stick his gun out the window and start firing at the helicopter? Couldn’t he hear them ordering him to pull over? If he had, none of this would have happened.”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes as if to say, Boys will be boys. “I couldn’t hear them neither,” she said. “We kind of had the music up loud. Like full freakin’ blast. We were just relaxing, you know? Driving down some roads Bo knew from work. All of a sudden the sky was full of light from that damned helicopter and all hell broke loose.

“I still can’t believe Bo started shooting,” Cyndi told Joe. “I knew he had a gun in the truck. I mean, who doesn’t around here? But when that helicopter showed up out of nowhere, Bo went postal and started screaming and shooting.”