Nowhere to Run (21 page)

April, the spell momentarily broken, flushed red and hissed,
“Shut up, Lucy
.
”

“Girls,” Marybeth said, and smiled a quick smile at Nate and Joe.

Joe thought,
There is a LOT going on here
.

 

AFTER THE DISHES were cleared and cleaned—it was the first time Joe could remember all three girls helping without being asked, apparently to impress their guest—Joe went out on the front porch. The sun had slipped behind the Bighorns an hour before, and because of the elevation, the temperature had already dropped twenty degrees. Although it was barely September, there was already a fall-like snap to the air. He’d noticed earlier that fingers of color were probing down through the folds of the foothills, and the leaves on the cottonwoods of the valley floor were starting to cup. V’s of high-altitude geese soared south along the underbelly of a moon-fused cloud. All were signs of an early winter. Nevertheless, he thought he’d suggest to Nate and Marybeth that they sit outside in the back. He knew Nate had more questions and he wanted to answer them out of earshot of the girls. Marybeth should be there because she so often provided insight he never considered, plus she said she’d spent a few hours earlier that day doing Internet searches trying to locate what she could online about Terri Wade, Diane Shober, and the Grim Brothers.

Joe went back inside the house to check the humidor in his office, hoping he still had some smokable cigars. But because he hadn’t filled the humidor well with water for months, the two cigars that remained crackled drily between his palms and were irredeemable.

He nearly ran into Lucy in the hallway when he came out. She was in her nightgown, and he anticipated a complaint about April when she said, “I think I saw someone in the backyard.”

“Was it Nate?”

“No, Nate’s in the kitchen talking with Mom.”

As she said it, there was a heavy thump against the siding outside, as if someone had tripped in the dark and reached out to prevent a fall. Joe continued down the hall with Lucy padding in bare feet behind him. Sheridan stuck her head out of her bedroom doorway and said, “What was
that
?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m going to find out.”

There were a number of possibilities. Maybe Nedney had seen Nate and called the feds or the sheriff; one of Nate’s friends or enemies had followed him here; a reporter from the
National Enquirer
investigating the Terri Wade story had located the witness; Camish and Caleb had tracked him down to finish the job. Or maybe something more innocent: high-school boys trying to spy on his daughters. The last possibility made Joe angrier than any of the previous theories.

He looked up to see Marybeth rising from the table and Nate striding across the living room. He’d hidden his .454 on the top shelf of the coat closet.

Joe bypassed the .40 Glock in his office drawer and snatched a 12-gauge Mossberg pump from his gun rack. He used the piece for goose hunting since it took 3-inch Magnum shells, and he jammed three into the magazine and worked the slide to put one in the chamber. His six-battery steel Maglite slipped into his belt.

Joe turned to Marybeth, who hovered in the hallway as if positioning herself between her daughters and any outside threat. He said, “Make sure the curtains are closed in the back bedrooms and the girls are in our room in the front of the house.”

He waited while Marybeth shooed Sheridan, April, and Lucy across the hall in their nightgowns into the master bedroom. April sulked, Lucy went willingly—practically skipping—and Sheridan shot a look at Joe and Nate as if she wished she were with them instead of with her sisters and mom. When the girls were across the hallway, Marybeth leaned out and silently mouthed,
“Okay
.
”

Although the operation had gone quickly and smoothly, Joe thought again of what his mother-in-law had said to him. How his job endangered his family. Here it was again. His girls were
used
to this sort of thing, and that wasn’t normal or right, was it?

Nate said, “Let’s go out the front and come around to the back on both sides.”

Joe nodded, said, “I’ll take the left side.”

As they slipped out the front door into the dark, Joe whispered over his shoulder, “Take it real easy, Nate. I live in this place. No shooting or pulling off ears if it can be avoided.”

Nate grunted his understanding. Then: “When we get in position, I’ll make a noise to get their attention. You be ready on the back side and come up behind them.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s take this slow.”

“Of course.”

JOE KEPT LOW TO AVOID being illuminated by the house windows and the lone streetlamp on the corner of the block. He went left, reminded painfully of the injuries in his legs. Once he was on the side of the house, he’d be in shadow. He avoided the concrete path and kept to the grass to avoid making noise. There was a narrow strip of grass between his house and Ed Nedney’s, and he’d turn at a ninety-degree angle at the corner and follow it to a six-foot wooden gate that led to his backyard. There, he’d wait for Nate’s distraction before opening the gate.

He turned the corner. Ed Nedney’s front porch light clicked on and Nedney stepped out on his landing, apparently to light his pipe. A match flared and lit up Nedney’s face, and he turned his head and saw Joe with the shotgun. Nedney froze, the match paused a few inches from the bowl of tobacco. He started to speak, but Joe held his index finger to his lips and hissed,
“Shhhhh
.
”

Nedney’s eyes were wide. Joe thought, he has a decision to make: obey Joe’s command or say what he was going to say. The match burned down in Nedney’s fingers. Another time, two years ago, his neighbor had come outside to find Joe marching another man across his yard at gunpoint. Nedney hadn’t liked the experience one bit.

His neighbor inhaled to speak, but Joe shot his arm out and pointed his finger at him, gesturing for him to go back inside. Although he was clearly angry, Nedney tossed the match aside, turned on his heel, and scuttled into his house. Probably to call the police or start drafting covenants for the neighborhood forbidding residents from lurking around in the dark with shotguns, Joe thought. Joe hoped Nate was in position so whatever was going to happen would happen quickly and he could warn Nate to keep out of sight in case the police were coming.

He paused at the back gate and tried to see into the backyard through gaps in the wood slats. He got a glimpse of the two large cottonwood trunks, Lucy’s bike propped up against a planter, and a small swatch of the cracked concrete porch. He couldn’t see who had made the noise, but the hairs on the back of his neck were up and he was sure someone or something was back there.

Of course, he thought, it could be innocent. Possibly neighborhood kids playing around. Or an animal—a stray dog, a coyote down from the foothills, a badger looking for dog food to eat, even a deer or bear. A few years before, Joe had been called out to shoot tranquilizer darts at a mountain lion perched in the fork of a mountain ash tree. And there was the occasional moose, elk, antelope, wolverine . . .

Behind the fence in the backyard was an empty field dotted with sagebrush that smelled sweet in the late summer and perfumed the dry air. That was the way Nate had approached their house earlier and Joe peered through the gap in the fence to see if the back gate was open. It was. He knew Nate had closed it earlier, which eliminated the animal options and indicated someone was back there. Whether the intruder had slipped out while he and Nate armed up and sneaked around or was still there was yet to be determined.

Then Joe heard it, a rhythmic wheezing sound. Somebody breathing, but not easily. Whoever it was remained in the backyard, but Joe couldn’t get an angle through the fence to see him.

From the other side of the house came an eerie high-pitched call mimicking the sound of an angry hawk:
skree-skree-skree-skree.

Joe quickly pushed through the gate and was startled when the hinges moaned angrily from lack of oil. He dashed through the opening into the backyard, putting distance between the open gate and himself in case whoever was back there had been as surprised by the rusty hinges as he’d been. There was only one human form he could see, and the man was standing in the muted light beneath the kitchen window with his back to Joe, looking in the direction of the hawk sound. The man was big and blocky, wearing a cowboy hat, an oversized canvas Carhartt ranch coat, and jeans. The left cuff was carelessly pulled outside a cowboy boot and bunched on the top of the boot. What looked like an M1911 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol was hanging down in his right hand along the hem of the ranch jacket.

Joe said, “Freeze where you stand or I’ll cut you in half with this shotgun.”

Joe recognized the hat, boots, and pistol. He raised his Maglite alongside the barrel of his shotgun after twisting it on so he could see clearly down the sights while aiming. The beam was choked down to the minimum size, and he trained it on the man’s head and shoulders.

He said, “Bud, is that
you
?”

Bud Longbrake, Missy’s ex-husband and Joe’s ex-father-in-law, stood like a bronze statue of a washed-up cowboy caught in a spotlight. Slowly, Bud turned his head a little so he could talk to Joe over his shoulder. “Hey, Joe. I didn’t know you were home.”

His voice was bass and resigned, and his words were slurred.

“I live here, Bud,” Joe said. “You know that. So what are you doing sneaking around in my backyard? Oh, and drop the Colt.”

Bud said, “If I drop it on the concrete, it might go off.”

“Then bend over and put it at your feet and kick it away, Bud.”

“Oh, all right.” It took him a moment to bend all the way over, and he grunted while he did it. He gave the weapon a kick with his boot. Joe thought Bud had gained quite a bit of weight since he’d last seen him, and his movements were stiff as if his joints hurt.

“Okay, turn around slowly,” Joe said. “Keep the palms of your hands up so I can see them.”

Bud did, and Joe put the beam of his flashlight on Bud’s face. He was shocked by what he saw. Bud’s eyes were rimmed with red and his cheeks were puffy and pale and spiderwebbed with thin blue veins. His nose was bulbous and looked as if it had been rubbed gray with woodstove ash. A three-day growth of beard sparkled like silver sequins in the beam of the flashlight.

“You look like hell, Bud,” Joe said, lowering the shotgun but keeping the flashlight on the old rancher.

Bud said, “You know, I feel like hell, too.” He swayed while he said it, as if he’d been hit with an ocean wave at knee level or he was doing some kind of lounge dance very poorly. His arms circled stiffly in their sockets, and he took a step forward to regain his balance. “Whoa,” he said.

“Sit down,” Joe said, propping his shotgun against Lucy’s bike. “Grab one of those lawn chairs.”

“I’ll do that,” Bud said, pulling a chair over and collapsing into it. The
whoosh
of his exhale floated in Joe’s direction, and the alcohol content was so high Joe was grateful he didn’t have a lighted cigarette. He hoped the chair wouldn’t collapse under the ex-rancher’s weight.

Nate remained hidden, and Joe purposefully didn’t look in his direction. Although Bud seemed completely harmless now, it was good to have Nate there monitoring the situation. It was preferable Bud didn’t know it.

Said Bud, “I heard this damned poem in the bar the other night I can’t get out of my head. It’s a Dr. Seuss poem. It goes:

“Dr. Seuss, you say,” Joe said. “I doubt
that
.”

Bud continued,
“
. . .
My body’s drooping, have trouble pooping

With that, Bud paused and grinned a new jack-o’-lantern smile that was the result of missing teeth. One gone on top, two on the bottom.

“Are you through?”

“Yup,” Bud said. “There’s more, but I can’t remember the lines. So yeah, I’m through.” He said it while digging into his ranch coat and coming out with a tin of Copenhagen. Joe watched as he formed a huge wad with his thumb and two fingers and crammed the snuff into the right side of his lower lip in front of his teeth. The wad was so big it distorted his lower face.

“So what are you doing here?” Joe asked. “I don’t appreciate you sneaking around my house at night.”

“I’m sorry,” Bud said, shaking his head. “I really am.”

Joe couldn’t believe how this man had changed in just two years. Bud had been one of the best-liked and most influential ranch owners in Twelve Sleep County. He was generous and avuncular, served on boards and commissions, donated thousands to Saddlestring charities, and almost single-handedly kept the 4-H Club and rodeo arena afloat. He’d been a kind step-grandfather to Sheridan and Lucy, and he’d briefly employed Joe as foreman of the Longbrake Ranch when Joe had been fired from the Game and Fish Department. But here he was, broken and embarrassing. And armed.