Си Бокс - Dark Sky

ALSO BY C. J. BOX THE JOE PICKETT NOVELS

Long Range

Wolf Pack

The Disappeared

Vicious Circle

Off the Grid

Endangered

Stone Cold

Breaking Point

Force of Nature

Cold Wind

Nowhere to Run

Below Zero

Blood Trail

Free Fire

In Plain Sight

Out of Range

Trophy Hunt

Winterkill

Savage Run

Open Season THE STAND-ALONE NOVELS

The Bitterroots

Paradise Valley

Badlands

The Highway

Back of Beyond

Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

Blue Heaven SHORT FICTION

Shots Fired: Stories from Joe Pickett Country

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Publishers Since 1838

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2021 by C. J. Box

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Box, C. J., author.

Title: Dark sky: a Joe Pickett novel / C. J. Box.

Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021. | Series: Joe Pickett |

Identifiers: LCCN 2020050216 (print) | LCCN 2020050217 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525538271 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525538288 (ebook)

Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3552.O87658 D37 2021 (print) | LCC PS3552.O87658 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050216

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050217

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For Paisley Woods

. . . and Laurie, always

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by C. J. Box

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Sunday: Mountain Money

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Monday: Green / Red Day

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Tuesday: Slippery Son of a Bitch

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Acknowledgments

About the Author

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars—pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.

—Henry Beston

The Outermost House

Technology . . . the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.

—Max Frisch

Homo Faber

Sunday Mountain Money

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

—T. S. Eliot

“East Coker,” from Four Quartets

ONE

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett stood on the edge of the tarmac with his hands thrust into the pockets of his parka and his gray Stetson clamped on tight against the cold wind. It was a week until his birthday and his leg hurt and the brisk chill made him feel all of his fifty-one years on the planet.

His first glimpse of the $65 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet was of a gleaming white speck high above the rounded, snowcapped peaks of the Bighorn Mountains to the west.

It was a cloudless mid-October morning, but it had snowed an inch during the night and the ten-mile-an-hour breeze cleared the concrete of the runway, rolling thin smoky waves of flakes across the pavement of the Saddlestring Municipal Airport. The timbered mountains had received three to five inches that would likely melt away in the high-altitude sun, but the treeless summits looked like the white crowns of so many bald eagles standing shoulder to shoulder against the clear blue sky.

“Cold this morning,” Brock Boedecker said.

“Yup.”

Boedecker was a fourth-generation rancher whose land reached up from the breakland plateau into the midpoint of Battle Mountain. He had a classic western look about him: narrow, thin, with deep-set eyes and a bushy black mustache, its tips extending to his jawline. It was the kind of weathered look, Joe thought, that had once convinced the marketing team at Marlboro to hire the local Wyoming cowboy who’d brought them horses for their ad shoot instead of the male models they’d flown out from Hollywood.

“Not quite ready for snow yet,” Boedecker said while tucking his chin into the collar of his jacket.

“Nope.”

“About a month early for these temps.”

“Yup.”

“It’s supposed to warm up a little later this week.”

“Yup.”

Boedecker asked, “Are you sure this is something we want to do?”

“Not really.”

“Damn. I feel the same way. Is there any way we can get out of it?”

“Nope.”

“I could do it without you,” the rancher said. “Hell, I do this all the time.”

“I know you could. But I wouldn’t feel right letting you down at the last minute. I’m the one that got you into this, remember?”

“How’s your leg?” Boedecker asked.

“Getting better all the time.”

It was true. The gunshot Joe had sustained was healing on schedule due to months of rehabilitation and physical therapy, but he still walked with a limp. On cold mornings like this, he could feel it where the rifle round had punched through his thigh—a line of deadness rimmed by pangs of sharp pain when he moved.

Boedecker sighed. It seemed like there was something he wanted to say, so Joe waited. Finally: “Well, them horses you ordered are all trailered up and ready. I’ll wait for you inside, I think.”

Joe nodded. He turned to watch Boedecker make his way toward the glass doors of the old terminal. The rancher wore a weathered black hat, a canvas barn coat stained with oil, and a magenta silk scarf wrapped around his neck. His back was broad. The scarf reminded Joe that cowboys, even the crustiest of them, always displayed a little flash in their dress.

“Thanks for helping me out with this, Brock,” Joe called out after him.

“You bet, Joe,” he answered with a wave of his hand. He paused at the door and looked over his shoulder. “I wasn’t sure I’d get here on time this morning. Did you know the sheriff has a roadblock set up so only authorized people can get to the airport?”

Joe said, “I heard about that.”