“Can’t sleep either?” Marybeth asked, fully awake.
“Nope.”
“I can’t stop thinking about the Robersons,” she said. “How horrible it is what happened with them.”
Joe grunted. He said, “Something about the story Pam told us doesn’t sound right.”
“Do you think she was lying? Leaving something out?”
“I want to hope that,” Joe said. “But it’s so similar to what happened in Idaho. There’s no way it can just be a coincidence.”
Marybeth asked, “Is it possible it’s some kind of warped policy directive? To go after people in different states in the same way?”
“Not likely,” Joe said. “The EPA is getting heat and bad publicity for the Sackett case because it was so outrageous. There’s no way they would encourage their people to do it again. No, this is similar, but it’s different. I just can’t figure out how. And I can’t figure out why Pam and Butch are in the middle of it.”
Marybeth sighed and snuggled in closer to him. “I know what you mean,” she said. “It just always amazes me how you can know someone for years and then find out things about them you never even imagined. I never had a clue about their dispute with the EPA, or that Butch had left Pam for so long.”
“They kept it in all that time,” Joe said.
Marybeth placed her bare arm over his chest. She said, “Sometimes I think the most mysterious thing that exists is the interworking of a relationship. You can just never even guess the things that go on behind closed doors.”
Joe said, “Nope.”
“Hannah is the one I’m most worried about.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
Joe thought about the arrival of Batista and Underwood on the scene. Underwood seemed to Joe like a type he’d dealt with before: tough, cold, professional-doing a dirty job well if they had no choice. A little like his friend Nate Romanowski and Nate’s friends. Despite Underwood’s manner and innuendo, Joe thought he could deal with him.
Batista was another matter. Batista unnerved Joe in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.
But when he closed his eyes, he saw the haunted face of Butch Roberson, somewhere up there in the beetle-killed forest in the dark, no doubt listening for the first sounds of the men who would be coming to hunt him down.
DAY THREE
9
Early the next morning, Dave Farkus awoke from a dream about someone pounding on his door to realize that, yes, someone was pounding on his door. And when someone pounded on the door, the entire twelve-by-sixty-foot single-wide trailer-perched on cinder blocks and sheathed in peeling sheet metal-shook as if it were coming apart at the rivets. He could even hear dishes tinkling in the cupboards above the sink.
“Hold on, goddamnit!” he shouted. “I’m coming, I’m coming. .”
Farkus threw back the covers and the stray black cat that slept on his bed screeched and ran for the closet. He stood up, spine popping like a muffled series of demolitions, and rubbed his face with his hands. Pulling on a pilled pair of sweats and a T-shirt, he slid his feet into a pair of cowboy boots and staggered down the narrow hallway past the bathroom, using the walls on both sides for balance.
Dave Farkus was fifty-seven and pear-shaped with rheumy eyes, jowls, thick muttonchop sideburns, and a bulbous nose. His top left incisor had a thin slot in it from biting off fishing line. He glanced at the digital clock over the stove. It was 6:29. He wondered who would be out and about so early. In his experience, if someone knocked on his door before seven or after nine at night, trouble of some kind was waiting on the porch.
He could see a bulky silhouette through the louvered slat windows of the metal front door. The silhouette was wearing a cowboy hat, and Farkus thought, They’ve come for me.
The trailer Farkus rented sat on an acre of sagebrush south of town, with a view of the municipal dump on one side and a gravel pit on the other. Someone had once attempted to plant a garden outside but had never progressed beyond making a rectangular outline in the dirt with river rocks. A 1953 Chevrolet pickup without an engine was propped up on its rims on the side of the trailer. Over the years, the trailer had settled so it listed slightly to the south. The high-altitude sun had faded the curtains to the point that they looked like parchment paper. The Formica tabletop was scarred with cigarette burns from a previous owner, and the floors were permanently gritty. But it had a satellite dish!
“Who is it?”
“Sheriff Kyle McLanahan,” the silhouette said, with a deep western twang.
“I ain’t done nothing recently,” Farkus said. “Besides, you ain’t the sheriff anymore.”
Farkus heard a heavy sigh. Then: “Just open the door. We’ve got something to talk about.”
“It’s awful early.”
“What-you’ve got to do your yoga? Open up, Farkus.”
He hesitated. He’d been renting the single-wide for five months from a woman bartender at the Stockman’s Bar who had moved in with a local realtor. Too much of her stuff was still in boxes in the closet, even though she’d promised, over and over, to retrieve them. Farkus had told her he wouldn’t pay the five-hundred-dollar rent that month until she cleared her things out. So had she hired the ex-sheriff to shake him down?
Or was it because of Ardith, his ex-wife, who demanded alimony payments even though she knew he’d lost his job? Had Ardith sent McLanahan to collect?
Or maybe he was serving as the debt collector for Bighorn Fly Shop? Coming for the cash Farkus owed or the three-hundred dollars’ worth of natural cock ringneck pheasant skins, mallard flank wood duck sides, and peacock eyes he planned to use to tie flies to sell to tourists and local yokels? Farkus had once seen McLanahan loitering around in the Bighorn Fly Shop, he recalled. So maybe Travis, the owner, had sent the ex-sheriff along to collect.
Farkus said, “I had no idea hackles cost so damned much these days on account of all the women braiding feathers in their hair. I’m a victim of fashion, and it ain’t fair!”
McLanahan said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I’ve got a proposition for you, so open the door.”
Dave Farkus raked his fingers through his hair that was still pressed to the side of his head from the pillow, and reached for the handle.
Kyle McLanahan was fatter than when Farkus had last seen him, and he’d grown a full rust-colored beard. It was easy to gauge how much the ex-sheriff had gone to hell in less than a year, because there was still a billboard just within the town limits of Saddlestring showing the sheriff with a carrot between his teeth feeding a horse and the words REELECT OUR SHERIFF KYLE MCLANAHAN. Farkus wondered if the man cursed every time he drove by it.
McLanahan squeezed into the vinyl bench seat on one side of the cluttered table but kept his hat on. It was a good hat with a Gus McCrae crease to it, which gave McLanahan a rakish frontier look. The beard helped, too.
“Why don’t you make some coffee?” McLanahan said. “I like mine strong enough to pick up a cow.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” McLanahan said with a drawl.
Farkus had heard that McLanahan was actually from West Virginia but while sheriff had become a frontier character actor. Farkus also knew him to be wily, ruthless, and ambitious. It was no secret that after McLanahan lost the election he went on a two-month bender that ended with him in the Meeteetse town jail, howling at the bitter injustice of it all. Rumors like that traveled fast in Wyoming.