“Pleasant,” Joe said.
“Hell of a legacy,” Nate said.
AS DUSK APPROACHED, Joe sat with his girls in Wyatt’s shack. Doris comforted Julie, whispering to her that things would be all right. Julie appeared catatonic. Sheridan reached out to her, held her hand.
The house continued to burn until it collapsed in on itself. The rain stopped and the sky cleared.
Joe was surprised to find out that telephone service was restored to Wyatt’s phone, and he called Marybeth.
“I’m with the girls,” he said. “They’re safe.”
He listened with tears in his eyes as Marybeth cried with joy, and handed the phone to Sheridan and Lucy so they could talk with her.
When they finally handed the phone back, Joe gave her an abbreviated version of what had happened. Since the girls were listening, Joe didn’t tell her about any of the details, only that J. W. Keeley had brought the girls to the ranch, that they’d been saved by Wyatt, and that Keeley and the Scarlett brothers had had a fight which resulted in the house burning down.
The story shocked her into silence.
“There’s a lot more to it, isn’t there, Joe?”
It was as if she knew he’d killed J. W. Keeley in cold blood.
“Yes, there is. But it’s for later,” he said.
She said the sheriff’s office had just called and they were sending the helicopter out. It should be there any minute.
“Is Nate still there?” she asked.
“Yes, but I haven’t seen him recently.”
“You might want to tell him the sheriff is coming,” she said.
Joe agreed and hung up.
JOE COULD HEAR the distant approaching thump of the helicopter as he walked the ranch yard. The smoke from the fire stung his nose and made his eyes tear up.
Nate was gone. So was a drift boat Joe had seen earlier leaning against the barn. And so was J.W. Keeley’s body. Joe guessed it was in the fire, where it would be discovered with the others. Neat and clean.
Joe drew his weapon and threw it as far as he could into the river. His holster followed.
It was crashing in on him now: what had happened, what he’d done, how J.W. had forever welded the fates of the Keeley, Scarlett, and Pickett families together by death.
As he saw Sheridan and Lucy walking toward him from Wyatt’s shack, he thought: But we are the ones who are left standing. Unlike Keeley or the Scarletts, Sheridan and Lucy are still here.
And that was all that mattered.
Sheridan stood close to him and asked, “Are you okay, Dad?”
“I’m fine,” he lied.
“What happens now?”
He could have said, “Everything will be different.” But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled his daughters close to him and waited for the helicopter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author, who has read too many overlong acknowledgments in novels lately, would like to thank those who significantly contributed to the research and writing of this book, including Sergeant Nadim Shah of the Wyoming Department of Corrections in Rawlins; D. P. Lyle, M.D.; Jim Hearne of MHP in Cheyenne, who went through hell on earth in an actual ranch dispute much like the one described in the book; Wyoming game warden Mark Nelson and his lovely wife, Mari, who read the book and offered suggestions and corrections, as always; and Mark Weak-land, who was my partner in an inadvertent drift-boat rocket ride down the North Fork of the Shoshone River near Cody, much like the one depicted in the novel. Thanks also to Don Hajicek for cjbox.net.
Special thanks to the publishing pros, especially my editor, Martha Bushko, who makes every book better than it ever was imagined; Michael Barson and the Putnam team, who have supported every novel when they didn’t have to; and my agent, Ann Rittenberg, who dives deep in the murk of submerged wreckage and surfaces holding up answers.
Turn the page for a preview of
FREE FIRE
The next Joe Pickett novel
by C. J. Box
Available in paperback
from Berkley Prime Crime!
1
Bechler River Ranger Station Yellowstone National Park July 21
A HALF HOUR AFTER CLAY MCCANN WALKED INTO the backwoods ranger station and turned over his still-warm weapons, after he’d announced to the startled seasonal ranger behind the desk that he’d just slaughtered four campers near Robinson Lake, the nervous ranger said, “Law enforcement will be here any minute. Do you want to call a lawyer?”
McCann looked up from where he was sitting on a rough-hewn bench. The seasonal ranger saw a big man, a soft man with a sunburn already blooming on his freckled cheeks from just that morning, wearing ill-fitting, brand-new outdoor clothes that still bore folds from the packaging, his blood-flecked hands curled in his lap like he wanted nothing to do with them.
McCann said, “You don’t understand. I am a lawyer.”
Then he smiled, as if sharing a joke.
2
Saddlestring, Wyoming October 5
JOE PICKETT WAS FIXING BARBED-WIRE FENCE ON A boulder-strewn hillside on the southwest corner of the Longbrake Ranch when the white jet cleared the mountain-top and halved the cloudless pale blue sky. He winced as the roar of the engines washed over him and seemed to suck out all sound and complexity from the cold midmorning, leaving a vacuum in the pummeled silence. Maxine, Joe’s old Labrador, looked at the sky from her pool of shade next to the pickup.
Bud Longbrake, Jr., hated silence and filled it immediately. “Damn! I wonder where that plane is headed? It sure is flying low.” Then he began to sing, poorly, a Bruce Cock-burn song from the eighties:
If I had a rocket launcher . . .
I would not hesitate
The airport, Joe thought but didn’t say, ignoring Bud Jr., the plane is headed for the airport. He pulled the strand of wire tight against the post to pound in a staple with the hammer end of his fencing tool.
“Bet he’s headed for the airport,” Bud Jr. said, abruptly stopping his song in midlyric. “What kind of plane was it, anyway? It wasn’t a commercial plane, that’s for sure. I didn’t see anything painted on the side. Man, it sure came out of nowhere.”
Joe set the staple, tightened the wire, pounded it in with three hard blows. He tested the tightness of the wire by strumming it with his gloved fingers.
“It sings better than you,” Joe said, and bent down to the middle strand, waiting for Bud Jr. to unhook the tightener and move it down as well. After a few moments of waiting, Joe looked up to see that Bud Jr. was still watching the vapor trail of the jet. Bud Jr. shot out his cuff and looked at his wristwatch. “Isn’t it about time for a coffee break?”
“We just got here,” Joe said. they’d driven two hours across the Longbrake Ranch on a two-track to resume fixing the fence where they’d left it the evening before, when they knocked off early because Bud Jr. complained of “excruciating back spasms.” Bud Jr. had spent dinner lobbying his father for a Jacuzzi.
Joe stood up straight but didn’t look at his companion. There was nothing about Bud Jr. he needed to see, nothing he wasn’t familiar with after spending three weeks working with him on the ranch. Bud Jr. was thin, tall, stylishly stubble-faced, with sallow blue eyes and a beaded curtain of black hair that fell down over them. Prior to returning to the ranch as a condition of his parole for selling crystal methamphetamine to fellow street performers in Missoula, he’d been a nine-year student at the University of Montana, majoring in just about every one of the liberal arts but finding none of them as satisfying as pantomime on Higgins Street for spare change. When he showed up back at the Longbrake Ranch where he was raised, Bud Sr. had taken Joe aside and asked Joe to “show my son what it means to work hard. That’s something he never picked up. And don’t call him Shamazz, that’s a name he made up. We need to break him of that. His real name is Bud, just like mine.”