C Box - Below Zero

The motor ground and took, and the pickup did a fast turn in the ranch yard toward a weathered two-track.

And they were gone.

NATE HOLSTERED HIS GUN and jogged across the ranch yard toward the barn and outbuildings. Ranchers always had extra vehicles, and in his experience the keys were usually in them. His boots crunched through the gravel and he got a glimpse of machinery in the shadows of the barn so he veered toward it.

Which was when he heard a muffled squeal, and a crash inside the house.

He paused. In the barn was a vehicle he could borrow so he could stay close to Stenko and Robert and the kidnapped rancher. But someone or something was in the house. The dogs watched him from the front porch as if wondering what his decision could be. That they didn’t bark at him seemed unremarkable at the time. For his entire life, he’d had an odd, tranquilizing effect on some animals. He had no explanation for it.

Nate sighed, shooed the dogs aside, and entered the old ranch house. It smelled of cooked meat and old people. The décor looked frozen in time from 1972-avocado-colored appliances, gold shag carpeting, a digital clock radio on the kitchen counter with large red numerals.

In the living room, a large woman in a floral printed dress was on her side on the floor in a hardback chair in the living room. Her arms were bound behind her back and her bare mottled ankles were tied to the chair legs with duct tape. The hem of her dress was pulled up because of her fall, exposing a meaty white leg. She had white hair, metal-framed glasses that made her big eyes look even bigger, and a sock in her mouth. She squirmed against her bindings, which consisted of shrugging her shoulders and wagging her head from side to side. He could see where she’d managed to wriggle across the carpeted floor and overturn a small telephone stand by banging it with her head. The phone lay useless near her hair. The cord had been cut.

The way she glanced down at her leg said to Nate she was embarrassed by the exposure.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She said, “Ooof.”

Nate said, “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good guys. I’m not going to hurt you. Who put the sock in your mouth?”

He flipped her dress back down and righted her chair before cutting the tape free with his Buck knife. She came up flailing and talking.

“They took him, they took Walter with them. They tied me to that chair and left me like that. I could have suffocated and died. The dogs could have come in through the screen and eaten me! It might have been days before anyone found me. And they marched Walter out of here at the point of a gun.”

Said Nate, “Do you have any idea where they’re going?”

She shook her head, “No. They didn’t say.”

“Do you have a car I could use? A truck?”

“In the barn,” she said, gesturing outside. “Walter! They took him. I just can’t believe he’s gone. He has a doctor’s appointment in Rapid City tomorrow. He’s been having, you know, incontinence issues. He’s not a well man, and it’s taken me months to convince him to go to the doctor at all-and now this!”

She reached out with both hands and squeezed Nate’s forearm. “He could die out there, you know. He doesn’t get out much. It’s been years since he’s been any farther away than Rapid City.”

“Call the sheriff,” Nate said. “Let them know what happened and give them a good description of your pickup, including the license number. I’ve got to go.”

“They cut the cord,” she said, shaking her head with disgust. “We have another phone in the bedroom and they cut that, too. Why did those men do this to us? Are they outlaws or something? The older one seemed kind of nice. The younger one-he gave me the willies.”

Nate remembered the cell phone Joe had given him and pulled it out of his pocket and flipped it open.

“Forget that, ” she said. “We don’t have cell service here.”

She was right-it read NO SIGNAL.

“Who are you, anyway? Why are you here?”

“Long story,” Nate said.

“Where’s my Walter? What are they going to do with him? He has a doctor’s appointment in Rapid City tomorrow.”

“You mentioned that,” Nate said, turning toward the screen door. “Look, I’ll send somebody here for you since you don’t have a phone. And I’ll do my best to find Walter.”

“Please, please,” she said, hugging herself. “He’s all I’ve got. And he’s got that appointment-I don’t want him to miss it.”

The screen door banged behind him.

THERE WERE PICKUP TRUCKS from the seventies, eighties, and nineties parked side by side in the barn as well as a huge sedan with tailfins. The keys were in them, but none of them would start. The pickup from the nineties wouldn’t even turn over because the battery had been cannibalized for use somewhere else. Nate kicked the bumper in anger, then ran back in the house. Walter’s wife sitting at the table, still stunned.

“I’m not having any luck out there,” Nate said. “Can I borrow whatever it is you drive?”

“I don’t drive,” she said, “haven’t for years. When I need to go to town Walter drives me. I guess I could learn but I keep putting it off…”

“Do you have anything that runs?” Nate asked, cutting in.

“The tractor runs,” she said.

“No, something faster.”

She tapped her chin with her index finger. “Well, Walter keeps his dirt bike out in the shed for irrigating. That runs.”

“Thanks,” Nate said, banging the door again.

THE DIRT BIKE was stripped down, battered, and muddy. A squared-off irrigation shovel was mounted into a PVC pipe Walter had fashioned and wired to the frame. The key was in it and Nate got it going on the third kick. The motor revved and popped is if were spitting mad, and the shed filled with acrid blue exhaust.

He guided it out through the door into the ranch yard and sat back in the saddle, getting used to the feel of it. The speedometer was broken, the dial frozen at 58 miles per hour. The gas gauge showed empty, but he hoped it was broken as well. The tachometer worked, as did the headlamp. As he raced through the gears he shot a backward glance over his shoulder.

Walter’s wife stood at the screen door, dabbing her face with a handkerchief with one hand, waving goodbye to him with her other.

He didn’t know Walter, but he wanted to return him unharmed. He had a doctor’s appointment, after all.

NATE’S TOUGHEST DECISION was when he reached the T of the two-lane highway. Robert and Stenko had either turned north, toward Devils Tower, or south, away from it. Nate knew if he didn’t make the correct choice, it was the difference between tailing them and possibly saving Walter or losing them forever. He turned south on U.S. 85 and opened up the throttle. The shovel head hummed in the wind and chunks of dried mud shook loose from under the dented fenders of the bike.

A lime-green Volkswagen beetle was in his lane. As he passed it, the faces of two college-age girls rotated toward him. The back of their car was crammed with boxes, pillows, lamps. Kids on their way to school to start the fall semester.

He read in their puzzled expressions that he must look like a demented farmer who’d lost his way.

NATE TORE THROUGH NEWCASTLE and didn’t stop. The dirt bike was starting to wear him down. His face stung from airborne insects that felt like pinpricks when they hit his skin. His hands and arms quivered from the hard vibration of the handlebars. The insides of his thighs burned because the motor was running so hot. He wondered if Walter had ever even taken the bike out on the open road and doubted the rancher had ever run it at highway speeds. It was like riding an electric razor.