After he’d told Marybeth he was safe but injured and he might be in the hospital for a few days, and she expressed relief, she said, “Something really odd happened this morning. Did you get my message?”
“No, what happened?”
“Pam asked to use the computer so she could check her email, and I pointed her to it. I’d left it on from last night when I called you. But when she sat down at it, her face turned white as a sheet. The EPA site was still up on the screen with Batista’s photo and bio. .”
Joe felt something flutter in his stomach.
“. . and Pam pointed to the photo of him and said, ‘What is this asshole doing here? And why are they calling him Juan Julio Batista?’”
“Let me guess,” Joe said. “She knew him as John Pate.”
“And that’s where things start to connect.”
Joe noticed that as he spoke the name, Butch’s head had snapped up sharply.
ONE WEEK LATER
35
With Nate Romanowski in the passenger seat of the pickup, Joe turned from the interstate onto the state highway that led to the burning mountains. Joe wasn’t wearing his uniform anymore, which made him feel incomplete. Seven red shirts were in a pile in the corner of the bedroom, where he’d thrown them as if they were radioactive. Spare badges, name tags, his weapon and gear belt, and a dog-eared laminate of the Miranda warning had been tossed on top of the pile.
Joe glanced down. His personal Remington shotgun was muzzle-down on the bench seat between them. He’d loaded it with double-ought buckshot.
Nate was tall and angular, with piercing blue eyes and a hatchet nose, and a short blond ponytail since he’d grown his hair back from a year before. The leather strap of the shoulder holster that held his.500 Wyoming Express handgun stretched across a white T-shirt beneath his open pearl-button cowboy shirt.
As they climbed, Joe hit his headlights. Smoke was still heavy in the air, and he hadn’t seen the sun or blue sky for a week. It was as if someone had placed a lid over the valley to keep it from boiling over.
There were no living trees on either side of the road, just skeletons with crooked black limbs. The ground was scorched and there were places where it still smoked. The air was bitter and sharp, and Joe’s lungs ached from breathing it in.
“This reminds me of black-and-white footage from World War One,” Nate said. “It looks like a moonscape.”
Joe grunted.
“How big is the fire now?”
“Last I heard, it stretches a hundred miles to the north and sixty miles to the south. It moves about twenty to twenty-five miles a day depending on the wind.”
“Big,” Nate said.
“And getting bigger.”
The local news was dominated by fire reports and stories of cabins and ranches being burned down, communities evacuated, smoke jumpers killed or injured. People wore masks when they went outside, and public health authorities cautioned young parents to keep their children indoors. Most of the residents of the Saddlestring retirement home had been flown to other locations where they could breathe.
“Where did you say we were headed?” Nate asked.
“A subdivision called Aspen Highlands.”
“I hate cutesy names like that.”
Nate had simply shown up on their doorstep three nights before. He’d been sitting on the porch reading a book when Marybeth drove Joe home from the hospital after they’d treated and released him for all of his injuries. Joe had been injured many times before without three days of hospital care, and cynically figured he’d been stuck there to give affidavits and statements regarding Butch Roberson rather than for the severity of his wounds. Dave Farkus was in the next room and he was recovering well. Joe had overheard Farkus telling an attractive nurse how he’d escaped death by bullet, fire, and a whitewater river. How he planned to sell his story to Hollywood.
When Nate saw them drive up, he raised his head and smiled a goofy smile, for Nate.
Marybeth braked a little too hard for Joe and flew out of the van to hug the falconer. She didn’t even close her door.
Joe limped around the van and shut it, and turned to Nate and Marybeth. It was good to see Nate again, he thought.
Nate gestured toward the burning mountains and said, “Sorry. It looks like I’m too late.”
Nate said to Marybeth, “I leave for a year and look what happens. Your husband burns the entire place to the ground.”
“Actually,” Joe said, “you’re right on time.”
“You’ve got something for me to do?”
“Yup.”
“Now?”
“Give me a couple of days to sort it out,” Joe said.
Nate nodded. “Good. I hear Sheridan has a kestrel. I’d like to see it.”
Marybeth clapped her hands girlishly and said, “I know she’d love to show it to you, Nate.”
Joe had to slow down the pickup as a yellow roll of smoke blew across the road. As he peered into the gloom, he couldn’t see actual flames anywhere and he wondered what there was left to burn.
Nate said, “In the long run, the fire will be a good thing. New growth, aspen, all that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Joe said. “Like I haven’t heard that a thousand times in the last week.”
“You’re getting grumpy,” Nate said.
“I keep thinking about Butch. How he could be me.”
“Stop thinking so much.”
“I’ve missed that kind of brilliant advice. Wait, no, I haven’t,” Joe said with an edge.
“So what’s this guy’s name we’re going to visit?”
“Harry Blevins,” Joe said. “Harry S. Blevins.”
“And you learned about him how?”
“Matt Donnell, the real estate mogul,” Joe said. “When he came by the house to tell Marybeth he’d sold the hotel, I asked Matt to use his contacts at the county records department to do a title search. He’s the one who came up with Blevins.”
“Ah.”
Donnell had been practically bursting with the good news. He’d learned that the Bureau of Land Management was in the midst of a search for more space in the county because they’d outgrown their old building. Donnell had swooped in and offered the Saddlestring Hotel lot, and the supervisor in charge liked the location-right in the middle of town.
He’d get all his money back, Matt told Marybeth. There would be no profit and what he’d spent on repairs was lost, but the bulk of the investment would be returned. Joe had expected Marybeth to be pleased with the news, but she wasn’t.
“They’ll tear it down, won’t they?” she had asked Donnell.
“Most certainly,” he said, nodding.
“So they can throw up a perfect new nothingburger government office building,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you see the irony in this, Matt?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “But I’m not in the business of irony. I’m in the real estate business.”
“It’s a good place for you,” Marybeth said to him, doing a shoulder roll and climbing the stairs toward their bedroom.
“I thought she’d be happy,” Donnell said to Joe. He was obviously distressed.
Joe said, “Give her some time.”
“It wasn’t easy, convincing the BLM to buy that lot. What I’m saying is it cost me a little money, if you know what I mean.”
Joe understood.
That’s when he asked Donnell to do the title check.
“So you’re unemployed,” Nate said as they drove up Hazelton Road.
“Yup.”
“When do you have to move out of your house?”
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” Joe said. “I think they’ll give me to the end of the month at least. The new director wants to spin it so it doesn’t look like I quit. The wheels of government turn pretty slow, you know.”
“Except when they don’t,” Nate said, and grinned. “So what are you going to do?”
Joe shrugged. “Something different. Something honest. I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning.”
“And what would that be?”