Back inside the pickup, they drove into the maw of the storm. It had enveloped them so quickly it was astonishing. Pellets of snow rained across the hood of the pickup and bounced against the cracked windshield. The heater blew hot air that smelled like radiator fluid inside the cab. Parker’s teeth finally stopped chattering, but his stomach ached from fear and his hands and feet were cold and stiff.
Juan leaned forward and squinted over the wheel, as if it would help him see better.
“This is the kind of stuff we live with every day,” Clint said to Parker. “Me and Juan are out in this shit day after day. We don’t sit in plush offices taking calls and sending bills. This is the way it is out here.”
Parker nodded, not sure what to say.
“The road forks,” Juan said to Clint in the backseat. “Which way do we go?”
“Left,” Clint said.
“Are you sure?”
“Goddammit, Juan, how many years did I spend out here on these roads?”
Juan shrugged and eased the pickup to the left. They couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction. The wind swirled the heavy snow and it buffeted the left side of the pickup truck, rocking the vehicle on its springs when it gusted.
Parker said, “When this is over and you’ve got whatever it is you want, what then?”
Clint said, “I’m still weighing that one, counselor. But for now just let me concentrate on getting to the house.”
“It would be helpful to know what you’ve got in mind,” Parker said, clearing his throat. Trying to sound conversational. “I mean, since I’m playing a role in this, I can be of better service if I know your intentions.”
Clint backhanded the lawyer with his free hand, hitting him hard on the ear. Parker winced.
“Just shut up until we get there,” Clint said. “I heard enough talking from you in that courtroom to last the rest of my pea-pickin’ life. So just shut up or I’ll put a bullet into the back of your head.”
Juan appeared to grimace, but Parker determined it was a bitter kind of smile.
Clint said to Parker, “You got the keys to that secret room old Engler has, right? The one he never let anybody into? The one with the books?”
“How far?” Juan asked. They were traveling less than five miles an hour. The snow was so thick, Parker thought, it was like being inside a cloud. Tall sagebrush just a few feet from the road on either side looked like gray commas. Beyond the brush, everything was two-tone white and light blue.
“What’s in the road?” Juan asked, tapping on the brake to slow them down even further.
Parker looked ahead. Six or seven oblong shadows emerged from the whiteout. They appeared suspended in the air. They looked like small coffins on stilts.
The pickup inched forward. The forms sharpened in detail. Pronghorn antelope — part of the same herd or from another herd. A buck and his does. They stood braced into the storm, oblivious to the truck. Juan drove so close to them Parker could see snow packed into the bristles of their hide and their goat-like faces and black eyes. The buck had long eyelashes, and flakes of snow caught in them. His horns were tall and splayed, the hooked-back tips ivory-colored.
“Fucking antelope,” Clint said. “Push ’em out of the way or run right over them.”
Instead, Juan tapped the horn on the steering wheel. The sound was distant and tinny against the wind, but the pronghorns reacted; haunches bunching, heads ducking, they shot away from the road as if they’d never been there.
Parker wished he could run like that.
“Few miles,” Clint said, “we’ll pass under an archway. I helped build that arch, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” Parker said.
“Me and Juan,” Clint said to Parker, “we’ve worked together for the past, what, twelve years?”
Juan said, “Twelve, yes. Twelve.”
“Some of the shittiest places you could imagine,” Clint said. “All over the states of Wyoming and Montana. A couple in Idaho. One in South Dakota. Most of those places had absentee owners with pricks for ranch foremen. They’re the worst, those pricks. They don’t actually own the places, so for them it’s all about power. You give pricks like that a little authority and they treat the workingman like shit. Ain’t that right, Juan?”
“Eees right.”
Parker thought: It’s like we’re the only humans on earth. The world that had been out there just that morning — the world of vistas and mountains and people and cars and offices and meetings — had been reduced for him to just this. Three men in the cab of a pickup driving achingly slow through a whiteout where the entire world had closed in around them. Inside the cab there were smells and weapons and fear. Outside the glass was furious white rage.
There was a kind of forced intimacy that was not welcome, Parker thought. He’d been reduced to the same level as these two no-account ranch hands who between them didn’t have a nickel to rub together. They had guns and the advantage, Parker thought, but they were smart in the way coyotes or other predators were smart, in that they knew innately how to survive but didn’t have a clue how to rise up beyond that. He knew that from listening to Clint testify in court in halting sentences filled with poorly chosen words. And when Clint’s broken-down ninety-eight-year-old grandfather took the stand, it was all over. Parker had flayed the old man with whips made of words until there was no flesh left on his ancient bones.
Clint likely couldn’t be reasoned with — he knew that already. No more than a coyote or a raven could be reasoned with. Coyotes would never become dogs. Likewise, ravens couldn’t be songbirds. Clint Peebles would never be a reasonable man. He was a man whose very existence was based on grievance.
“This is getting bad,” Juan said, leaning forward in his seat as if getting six inches closer to the windshield would improve his vision. Thees.
Parker gripped the dashboard. The tires had become sluggish beneath the pickup as the snow accumulated. Juan was driving more by feel than by vision, and a few times Parker felt the tires leave the two-track and Juan had to jerk the wheel to find the ruts of the road again.
“We picked a bad day for this,” Juan said. Thees.
“Keep going,” Clint said. “We been in worse than this before. Remember that time in the Pryor Mountains?”
“Sí. That was as bad as this.”
“That was worse,” Clint said definitively.
There was a metallic clang and Parker heard something scrape shrilly against the undercarriage of the truck.
“What the hell was that?” Clint asked Juan.
“A T-post, I think.”
“Least that means we’re still on the road,” Clint said.
“Ay-yi-yi,” Juan whistled.
“We could turn around,” Parker said.
“We could,” Juan agreed. “At least I could follow our tracks back out. As it is, I can’t see where we’re going.”
“We’re fine, goddammit,” Clint said. “I know where we are. Keep going. We’ll be seeing that old house anytime now.”
Parker looked out his passenger window. Snow was sticking to it and covering the glass. Through a fist-sized opening in the snow, he could see absolutely nothing.
He realized Clint was talking to him. “What did you say?”
“I said I bet you didn’t expect you’d be doing this today, did you?”
“No.”
“You’re the type of guy who thinks once a judge says something, it’s true, ain’t you?”
Parker shrugged.
“You thought after you made a fool of my grandpa you were done with this, didn’t you?”