“Thanks, Pops,” Timber said aloud to himself between epithets. “What—did you spend a whole four hundred fucking dollars on it?”
As they’d told him he would, he found the keys under the fender on top of the driver’s-side tire. The car wasn’t locked—Who would steal it, anyway?—and he threw the garbage bag on the backseat. The fabric of the seats was stained and ripped, and it smelled of old people.
Timber scooted in and put the key in the ignition. After a few seconds of a high-pitched grinding sound, the engine caught. In the cracked rearview mirror, he saw an ugly puff of black smoke blow out of the exhaust pipe.
There was less than eighty-five thousand miles on the odometer, which confirmed to Timber that the people who had previously owned it were old folks who’d probably driven it from their home to doctor’s appointments and the mailbox and not much beyond that.
But when he engaged the transmission, the Cavalier lurched forward. It was underpowered and the suspension was mushy, but it moved. He guessed that if he could find the maintenance record it would show that the old geezers had changed the oil every three thousand miles on the dot and rotated the tires every ten thousand.
And that was all he could ask for at the moment.
—
THEY’D TOLD HIM to avoid the interstate highways as much as he could. No reason, they’d said, to draw any more attention to himself than necessary. So it was north to Lamont, then Three Forks. Jeffrey City, Moneta, Big Trails, Ten Sleep, Greybull, then Winchester, the back way. He knew the little towns and highways from when he was a high school athlete and they’d take the bus from town to town, to play football games. Wyoming was all like a small town with incredibly long streets.
After Winchester, he’d have to jump on Interstate 90 into Montana. Crow Agency, then Hardin, then his destination.
He’d been there a few times. But never like this.
His infirmary scrubs were on top of the pile of clothing in the trash bag in the backseat.
—
OUTSIDE OF JEFFREY CITY, which wasn’t a city at all, he pulled over to the side of the highway after checking his mirrors. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the Asian CO was following him. But he wasn’t.
He kept the Cavalier idling and leaned over in his seat and popped open the glove compartment.
The sheet on top was a Google map of where he needed to go. He studied it and shook his head and folded it neatly in two. He’d pay more attention when he got closer. There was a printout of the face of a girl. She was a hottie. But at least he knew what she looked like.
On the bottom of the glove compartment was a bright green ceramic knife with a four-inch blade. It was a familiar knife, and he remembered his mother using it to slice onions and carrots in her kitchen. It touched him that she would give up that knife.
It looked battered, but it wouldn’t show up if he had to walk through a metal detector. He wished it was bigger, but he knew it would work.
He placed the knife next to his right thigh and put the directions and the photo back into the glove box. He’d study them when it was time to study them.
Timber eased back out onto the old highway. In front of him, above the northern horizon, was a thick black band. The storm the CO had told him about was gathering.
—
SOUTH OF MONETA, in the middle of nowhere, in a high steppe desert of sand and thigh-high sagebrush, Timber tapped his brakes because a herd of sheep was up ahead on the road. The rancher on horseback driving them waved a sort of apology, but kept his herd trotting up the bad two-lane highway.
It had been years since Timber had seen sheep in Wyoming and he’d never liked sheep in the first place. Who ate sheep? Why did they even exist? He thought: Range maggots.
The rancher in charge rode a handsome buckskin and wore a wide-brimmed straw summer cowboy hat. He had a toothbrush mustache and a squared-off jaw and wore a pink scarf around his neck. Timber hated him immediately because of his good humor and attitude. Of course there are sheep on the road, he seemed to say, but no one who takes the old highway south of Moneta would expect otherwise.
There were other cowboys on the drive, but they looked Mexican or worse, Timber thought. He resisted the urge to plow through the herd of sheep and leave dozens of them writhing on the road.
After inching along for twenty minutes behind the sheep, he pulled to the side and let the herd get ahead of him.
But not all of them did.
Although the rancher and his Hispanic cowboys had moved the herd over the next rise, there was a single ewe struggling to keep up. Timber watched her and narrowed his eyes. She was obviously old and lame, and she had no fluidity to her gait. She pitched up and down with every step. The rancher and his hands probably didn’t know they’d lost one.
—
IN PRISON, Timber had learned never to take revenge without really thinking it through. On this, his mother didn’t have a clue. She only knew about the times he’d gotten into trouble. She didn’t know about the times he’d carefully planned something.
He’d wait for the perfect scenario to occur. That involved making sure the COs weren’t in the yard or were looking elsewhere. He’d do it where the closed-circuit cameras couldn’t see him. He made sure his weapon was honed and reliable so it wouldn’t snap in two on the initial impact.
So he eyed that straggling ewe.
When he didn’t see either the rancher or the Mexicans come back for her, he leaned over and popped the button on the glove compartment.
—
THERE WAS DUST in the air from both the herd and the sheep cowboys. It just hung there.
The ewe was bawling, calling ahead, saying, Wait for me.
She paused when Timber walked up next to her. She looked at him with a blank expression only domesticated farm animals like cows and sheep are capable of, one of pure blind trust and incredible stupidity. She was large, nearly two-hundred pounds, all of it wool and mutton and dead dumb eyes.
Timber stabbed her with the knife behind her front shoulder, then he did it again. He stabbed her like a manic jackhammer, so many times and so quickly that he was out of breath.
The ewe collapsed, then rolled to her side. Her last breath rattled out in a sigh and she was still. Better that, he thought, than coyotes tearing her apart.
That’s the secret, he thought as he backed away. It wasn’t like the movies when a single knife thrust did them in. The more stab wounds, and the deeper they were, the better. It was exactly as he’d done in the yard to that son of a bitch who’d called him out for being white trash. Twenty-seven stab wounds in less than half a minute. There was no way that guy would live and identify his assailant. It had been so sudden and so violent that Timber would never have to worry about that guy again.
—
TIMBER WALKED BACK to the Cavalier with his entire right arm greasy with ewe blood and lanolin from the wool. The ceramic green knife was red.
He paused at a spring seep in the ground and plunged his right arm into it and watched curlicues of red form at the surface. When he withdrew his arm, there was no more sheep’s blood on it and the green knife was clean.
He thought: Do it fast and go home.
—
WHEN TIMBER CATES got back into his car, he opened the Playmate cooler that Brenda had left for him. In the distance, the dust cloud formed by the herd of sheep was moving to the right, away from the highway. He’d have a clear shot now.
He found a large package of fried chicken wrapped in aluminum foil and he gleefully ate it all and threw the bones out the window. Even though it was cold, it was the best fried chicken—the best food—he’d had in three years.