Blood shook his head, setting the issue aside. “I need two men and a cruiser.”
Moody frowned and squinted. “The hell for?”
“Because I’m a one-man office. Or didn’t you and your Samaritans even read that?” He was pointing to the eviction notice.
Moody frowned again, having to set down his coffee mug now and pick up the notice, hating to be made to play along. Then he read the name there. Then his closed mouth stretched wide.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said.
Blood tried to undercut him. “You haven’t notified the Marshals Service, then.”
Moody was enjoying a great and generous grin. “Glenn Alien Ables,” he said, so pleased he almost swallowed the notice. “Tax evasion.”
Blood said, “Don’t know what Judge Leary’s thinking. Two years since Ables defaulted on his bail, and now all of a sudden they realize he hasn’t been paying his taxes.”
“Judge Leary’s senile,” said Moody, returning quickly to distaste. Then he leaned back in his chair, as far back as a man of his size was able. He made a show of lacing his thick hands behind his head, his face burning with glee. “Now how exactly you planning on evicting a federal fugitive?” he said.
Rookie officer Brian Kearney drove. Sergeant Carl Haley sat in back with his arms crossed, hat brim set down over his eyes, chin on chest. Sheriff Blood sat up in front. The cruiser’s engine lifted, strong. Trees alongside the interstate ran past his window; the mountains walked.
Rookie Kearney was young and eager. He said, “You see helicopters and planes buzzing the mountain every now and again. Government cars driving through town. Sometimes you pick up stuff on the radio, them talking back and forth.”
Blood tapped the folded eviction notice against his leg. There were busted peanut shells on the unworn blue floormat.
Kearney said, “Those federal marshals are big-time. Him hiding out there on them, that’s some guts.”
Sheriff Blood said, “Two years on top of a mountain.”
“They say he slips into town sometimes,” Kearney said. “People see him at flea markets and such, but I don’t know. He’s got loyal neighbors, though. You know they bring him his food and mail?”
They passed a road sign that read HUNTERS CHECK YOUR ELK IN HERE. Another showed border distances in miles and kilometers. Blood saw Paradise Ridge off the road up ahead, short and stout and distinctive due to its blunted top, which was flattened like an anthill.
Rookie Kearney said, “All that surveillance and running around. How could it be that so many federal marshals are afraid of just one man?”
Blood looked out the windshield. “It’s his family up there with him. The feds storm in there and something goes wrong, think of what the papers would say the next day. They’re all for waiting on him to leave there alone. I don’t imagine feds much like little kids.”
They went on a little farther, the cruiser swallowing up white road lines. Kearney looked across at him. “What are we doing here, then?” he said.
“How’s that?”
“Well, why are we here and the marshals not? What are we supposed to be doing?”
“Delivering an eviction notice. Doesn’t matter who screwed up or how this got put on Judge Leary’s schedule. I tried calling the Marshals Service in Arlington, Virginia, before we left. A very pleasant woman there put me on hold.”
Kearney said, “You think he’ll try something?”
Blood shook his head. “We’ll knock, they’ll pretend nobody’s home, and we’ll nail the notice to the door. We’ll do what we have to do but we won’t get caught up provoking him.”
“We’re bringing him his mail too,” Kearney said, disappointment in his voice. Then he brightened. “Wonder if the feds ever tried this. Just knocking on his front door and asking him to come out, please. Couldn’t you just see us making this bust? I could use some action. Tickets and paperwork coming out of my ears. Got my typing up to forty-per.”
Sheriff Blood looked at him. Kearney was staring beyond the road in front of him, viewing some distant heroic act starring himself. These were the aspirations of young men, world-beaters. “You’re greener than moss,” Blood told him. “You know that? Near as soft too.” Rookie Kearney grinned and nodded, sheepish, unapologetic. Blood kept at him. “How’s Leslie?” he said. “How’s she coming along?”
Kearney’s grin vanished. “Seven months now,” he said.
Blood said, “Sounds like a case of nerves.”
“More than that. It’s a nightmare, this thing. You would think seven months is plenty time to get a handle on it. But it’s too much for me entirely. More and more I’m thinking like it’s all one big mistake.”
Sheriff Blood reserved judgment a moment.
“I’m trying to come up with a green deeper than moss,” he said. “You’re consistent anyway. Smile at a gun barrel, run from your wife. Rookie through and through.”
Kearney nodded again as though he understood. They were turning off the interstate now and onto the tree-lined, one-lane county access road leading to Paradise Ridge, rattling in their seats as the cruiser’s suspension rocked.
“Sheriff,” Kearney said, curious about something now, and so a bit more respectful. “We’re talking, right?” He was even trying to look at Blood, his eyes cheating off the narrow grassy road. “What’s going on between you and the chief?”
Blood looked at him. It seemed like a genuine question.
“He hates Indians,” Blood said. “It may be as simple as that. Some people we just piss off. In any case, I’m sure your veteran partner in back is taking notes.”
There was no challenge from Haley. They turned off the county road past a bullet-pocked DEAD END sign and rolled over a groaning iron bridge painted blood-orange to match its rust. Paradise Creek, such as it was, dribbled between two hard brown clay banks beneath.
Great oaks and pines crowded and darkened the rising, winding road. The creek ran parallel and appeared somehow to grow stronger as they climbed, its clay banks spreading wider and filling in between with wet, smoothed rocks; there must have been a runoff somewhere below. Tire ruts in the road were jaundiced and deep.
The road eventually left the creek and snaked up under bright shafts of angled sun, then up and over a steep rise and suddenly into the bright light of a broad, tree-lined clearing. It was a plateau, situated an even third of the way up the mountain, more than seventy-five yards long and roughly oval in shape. The dirt ground was generally even, blotchy all over with straggles of dead straw weeds.
The cruiser rolled halfway in and stopped. Kearney cut the engine and there was a Big Sky silence, no traffic noises or train whistles, no sound even in the distance, nothing whatsoever.
Haley finally stirred in back. “Where’s the road?” he grumbled.
Blood was first out of the cruiser. He stood and spotted the opening in the trees leading to the goat path up the mountainside, but it was well overgrown now and impassable, almost as though by design.
Haley, a bullet-headed sergeant with puffs of gray showing over his chiseled ears, got out and saw it too. “Looks like we walk,” he said.
Blood tried to take it all in. He breathed the air and tasted nothing familiar. “Used to hunt all over this mountain,” he said. “Squirrel, buck, coon. Soft land,” he remembered, toeing the cracked earth. “No more.”
Haley unlocked the trunk and unlatched and removed the shotgun that was kept there.
“Now hold on,” said Blood.
Haley went ahead and pumped the Remington, checking it. “He’s barricaded himself up there,” he said.
Blood said, “All the more reason to go in cautionary.”
Haley looked at him. “I suppose, then,” he said, “you got a plan.”