“What—you mean Death Cab for Cutie?”
“Death Cab for Cutie?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew I didn’t like them,” Joe said, and reached out and grasped Bud Jr.’s ear.
“Tell me why you’re here,” Joe said, twisting hard. In the back of his mind, he listed the charges he could be brought up on. There were a lot of them. But he had the impression Bud Jr. would do all he could to avoid talking to the police for any reason.
“That hurts,” Bud Jr. cried, and reached up for Joe’s hand. Joe kicked Shamazz hard in the shin with the toe of his boot. Bud Jr. squealed and dropped to his knees.
“I learned this from a friend,” Joe said. “Remember Nate Romanowski? Now tell me what I want to know or I’ll twist your ear off. I’ve seen a couple of ears come off. They make a kind of popping sound, like when you break a chicken wing apart. You know that sound? I’d guess it’s even worse from the inside, you know?”
“Please . . . Joe, this isn’t like you.” There were tears of pain in his eyes.
Joe nodded. It wasn’t. Whatever. He twisted. Bud Jr. opened his mouth to scream.
“No yelling,” Joe said. “If you yell, you lose the ear. And if that happens, you’ve got another ear I can pull off. Then it will be real hard to listen to Death Cab for Cutie.”
Shamazz closed his mouth, but there were guttural sounds coming out from deep in his chest.
“Tell me why you’re here.”
“I wanted to come home,” Bud Jr. said, spitting out the words. “I just wanted to come home.”
Joe was taken aback. He said, “But you don’t have a home. Bud Sr. lost the ranch. You knew that.”
“Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow,” Bud Jr. said.
“We never took advantage of your dad,” Joe said. “Missy did. You did. But I worked for him.”
“Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow.”
“Now where can I find your dad?” Joe asked, keeping the pressure on.
“You really don’t know? You really don’t?”
“Tell me why you’re here.”
He yelped, “I’m here to reclaim what’s mine.”
Joe said, “Nothing’s yours anymore.” But when he saw the wild-eyed passion in Bud Jr.’s eyes—passion he’d never seen before—Joe wondered if Shamazz was capable of murder, or at least willing to help out his father. He’d never thought of the kid that way before.
After he said to Bud Jr., “Tell me everything,” Joe noted movement in his peripheral vision and glanced up to see a sheriff’s department SUV cruise through the opening between the drugstore and the bar. Sollis was at the wheel. Had he been seen?
Joe involuntarily eased up on the ear, and Shamazz took full advantage of the sudden release of pressure. From where he sat on the garbage-covered pathway, he was able to reach back and fire a roundhouse punch that caught Joe full force in the temple. The blow made Joe let go, and staggered him. Bud Jr. scrambled to his feet and punched again, clipping Joe across the jaw and dropping him. Joe tried to protect his face against a fury of Hacky Sack-conditioned feet, but Bud Jr. was fueled by anger and desperation, and several hard kicks hit home. Joe rolled away, felt two sharp thumps in his back along his spine and one near his kidneys, and by the time he was able to right himself and struggle to his hands and knees, Shamazz had run away.
Joe stayed like that for a long time. His head and face ached sharply, and as his shock wore off, the kicks to his arms, shoulders, neck, and back began to pound.
Moaning, he managed to lean against the brick wall and vertically crabwalk up until he could balance on his feet again. He probed at his head for blood, but didn’t find any. He hoped like hell Sollis wouldn’t drive by again and see him. He wanted no one to see him.
As he limped to his pickup, Joe looked at his right hand—the one that had twisted Bud Jr.’s ear nearly off—as if it belonged to someone else. Like Nate, maybe.
Bud Jr. had fought like a wild man. Partly out of self-defense and partly out of something inside him that was of greater intensity than Joe’s urge to protect himself. In a way, he admired Bud Jr., while he felt ashamed of himself both for the pressure he’d applied and for opening himself up for the attack.
Angry with himself, Joe climbed into his pickup. He looked into his own eyes in the rearview mirror, wondering who was looking back.
Ten minutes later, when he thought he’d recovered enough to find his voice again, he dug his phone out of his pocket—it was undamaged—and it rang before he could call Marybeth. The display indicated it was his wife calling him.
“Hi,” he croaked.
She paused. “Joe, are you all right?”
“Dandy,” he said.
“Your voice sounds different.”
He grunted.
“Look,” she said, “I had to call you right away. There’re some things about the company Rope the Wind that I find really fishy. I’ve been on the Internet all afternoon, and I can’t find the answer to some questions that just pop right out at me.”
“Like what?” he said. He shifted in his seat because the places on his back where Shamazz had kicked him were sore. He’d had his ribs broken before, and he knew they’d not been fractured. Overall, he was okay, but it would be a while before he knew if anything was bruised or damaged.
“I located the original articles of incorporation application online at the secretary of state’s office,” she said. “Earl wasn’t originally on the board five years ago. Five years is an eternity as far as wind energy companies go. Five years is ancient.
“The chairman and CEO was a man named Orin Smith,” she said. “He listed his address as a post office box in Cheyenne. So of course the next step was to find out what I could about Orin Smith and see if I could connect him to Earl.”
Joe hmmmmmmm’d to keep her going.
She said, “I came back with thousands of hits. And this is where it gets strange. Orin Smith is apparently the chairman and CEO of hundreds of companies incorporated in Wyoming. They run the gamut from energy companies like Rope the Wind to crazy ones like ‘Prairie Enterprises,’ ‘Bighorn Manufacturing,’ ‘Rocky Mountain Internet,’ ‘Cowboy Cookies’ . . . all kinds of companies.”
Joe grunted, and said, “A couple of those sound sort of familiar.”
“I thought so, too,” she said, “but that’s the really weird thing. They’re just names. They sound like companies you hear about, but they don’t really exist.”
Joe shook his head, “What?”
“None of them seem to produce anything. There’s no record of them after incorporation. Beyond the name itself, these companies just seem to be sitting there.”
“I’m lost,” he said.
“I am, too. I don’t get it. And I don’t understand at all how Earl Alden came into the picture.”
Joe said, “We might be really going the wrong direction here. This doesn’t seem to fit any kind of scheme I can think of.”
“I know.”
Then she said, “But I found one thing of interest.”
“Yes?”
“I think I know where we can find Orin Smith.”
“Fire away,” he said.
“He’s in federal custody in Cheyenne. It’s amazing what one can find with a simple Google search of a name.”
“What are the charges?”
“Let’s see,” she said, and Joe could hear her tapping keys. “Securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, international money laundering to promote specified unlawful activity, money laundering . . . on and on. Eleven counts in all.”
“Which agency’s got him?”
“FBI.”
“Good,” he said, putting his pen down. “Someone owes me a favor there.”