Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (21 page)

“Cody!” Melissa said from the backseat.

“I just want to make sure we all understand each other,” Cody said. “It’s better to use plain language.”

“We’re not the criminals,” Melissa said. “We’re not the people trying to take babies away from their parents!”

“The law is on his side,” Cody said patiently. “I don’t agree with it. There’s a lot about the law I don’t agree with. We’ve got Aubrey Coates out on the street, for one thing. But the law is on Judge Moreland’s side.”

Melissa said, “But his wife doesn’t even know about Angelina, so something really weird is going on. And his son, Garrett, killed our dog, not to mention what he and his friend did to Jack and in our house!”

Cody talked to her via the rearview mirror. “Melissa, his wife not knowing is not a crime. It’s strange, yes. But it’s not a crime. And we think we know who killed Harry, but we haven’t proved it.”

“What about Luis?” I said.

Cody smiled bitterly. “I’m the one who kicked the shit out of Luis. For what? For cruising through your neighborhood. Who is the criminal in this instance?”

“Garrett dumped him. That’s a crime.”

“And how do we know that?” Cody asked. “How do we know Luis didn’t dump himself? I mean, Garrett could claim Luis wanted out of the car, that he didn’t know how badly Luis was injured, that Luis just didn’t want to go to the hospital. So Luis wanders off by himself in the dark and stumbles into the South Platte. How is Garrett liable for that?”

I said nothing.

“Why are you
doing
this?” Melissa asked, tears in her eyes.

“I want to make sure we all realize what we’re doing,” Cody said. “That’s all.”

“We realize,” I said.

“Do you?” Cody asked.

“When Brian gets his hands on those photos, it might all go away,” Melissa said. “Maybe this is as far as we need to go.”

“You trust Brian and his photos?” Cody asked into the rearview. There was a pinch of sarcasm in the question and a dollop of pity. “Think about it. What are these photos supposed to show? Judge Moreland in bed with a girl? With a boy? What if they’re doctored? What if the judge sees them as what they could be—amateur blackmail? Then where are you? And where is Brian when this happens? I’d guess he’d be long gone on one of his business trips.

“I’m just saying,” Cody said. “Speculating, because that’s what us cops do.”

Melissa said, “I don’t like your attitude about Brian.”

Cody shrugged. “Jesus, this is why I
should
be suspended from the Denver PD, I guess: I can’t keep my mouth shut.”

“Why are you doing this?” Melissa asked again. I reached back for her hand, but she’d withdrawn, crossing her arms across her breasts.

“Because,” Cody said, “once we unleash Jeter Hoyt, we don’t know what the hell will happen.”

I asked Cody to pull over, which he did, and I climbed into the backseat with Melissa. She was stiff at first, but finally let me hold her.

“We’re doing the right thing,” I whispered into her hair. “It’ll be all right.”

“I’ve got one more question for you,” Cody said. He took our silence as assent. “If you had it all to do over again, would you still adopt?”

“Yes,” we said simultaneously.

“Good,” Cody said. “Good for you.” His voice started trailing away. “Children need to be wanted…”

I noticed that as I’d held her, she’d slipped one of her hands out from beneath the blanket and she was holding the edge of Angelina’s car seat in a white-knuckled death grip.

Saturday, November 17

Eight Days to Go

L
INCOLN, MONTANA, POPULATION ELEVEN
hundred, was a hamlet in the Helena National Forest on the bank of the Blackfoot River. The little community made the news in the 1990s when Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, was arrested there in his hovel of a cabin, which was later shipped whole over Stemple Pass to the capital city of Helena fifty-nine miles to the southeast. It was a tough and sloppy little town that looked as if it had been dropped into the trees from a helicopter, and some of the buildings didn’t land well.

It was also the home of Jeter Hoyt.

We arrived at 3:00 P.M. on Saturday. Fourteen hours. It was like driving across most of Western Europe, and all we’d done was cross one state and enter another.

Cody parked at a bar. Apparently, his cell-phone charge was depleted because it had spent seven or eight hours searching vainly for a signal to grab on to, so he’d need to use the phone inside. I got out with him, said, “You were a little rough back there.”

He lit a cigarette. “I get like that when I’m not smoking or drinking,” he said. “When all I’ve got is reality staring me in the fucking face.”

“Thanks for driving, though,” I said.

“My plea sure.”

“What if your uncle isn’t around?”

“Always a possibility,” Cody said. “It’s the tail end of hunting season. Remember hunting season?” he asked, his expression wistful.

“I do. But you talked to him a while ago, right?”

Cody nodded. “I told him we might be coming up. He didn’t say he’d be here or not. He just grunted at me.”

While Cody went inside, I leaned against the Cherokee with my hands in my pockets. There was snow on the tops of the peaks to the south and the Scapegoat Wilderness Area to the north. I could see a skiff of snow in the shadows of the pines behind the bar. Little mountain towns like this were especially unattractive during two periods of the year: now, when there was just enough early snow to muddy the ground but not enough to freeze and cover it, and again in the spring, when the snow melted and revealed all the garbage that had been tossed aside. But as if to offset the appearance, this is when a town like Lincoln smelled best, a heady mix of pine trees, the forest floor, woodsmoke. As I breathed it in, it reminded me of home, wherever that was.

I turned to see that Angelina was awake and grinning at me through the window. Melissa held her tightly. That smile filled me with such unabashed joy that I knew I was doing the right thing. I rapped at the window so she’d open it.

“Smell that,” I said.

“It smells, um, woody,” she said.

“If only these little places had jobs for international tourism specialists,” I said, reaching inside the Jeep so Angelina could grab my finger. “What a great place to live, to raise little kids.”

“Where her neighbor could be the Unabomber,” Melissa said, and we both laughed. Angelina squealed with delight
simply because her parents were laughing. We hadn’t done enough of that lately, I decided.

Cody came out of the bar with a Coors Light in his hand and a cigarette.

“Some old high-school buddies in there,” he said. “D’you remember the Browning brothers or Chad Kerr? They asked about you and Brian.”

“They did?”

“Yeah,” Cody said. “So much for coming up here incognito, eh? I forgot how everybody knows everybody’s business in Montana.”

“What about Uncle Jeter?”

“He’s waiting for us out at his place. He said he’d disarm the trip wires so we could drive right up to his house.”

“
What?
”

“I’m
joking,
” Cody said, tossing his cigarette aside into the mud.

UNCLE JETER’S CABIN WAS
tucked away in an alcove of pine and aspen trees and accessed via an ascending two-track road with potholes filled to the top with chocolate-milk-colored water. Cody said, “I
think
I still remember how to get there …”

We passed under an ancient sagging lodgepole-pine archway that was dark gray with moisture and crawling with bright green and white lichen. On one support pole was a tiny wood-burned sign that said
HOYT OUTFITTING SER VICES
. On the other was a rusted metallic sign that said NO WHINERS. Inside the archway, Uncle Jeter’s cabin was shambling and low-slung, looking like a scene from 1880 except for the satellite dish mounted on a pole and aimed at a southern gap of cloudy sky to the south. I saw two four-wheel-drive vehicles—a
Dodge Power Wagon from the 1960s and a new-model but beat-up Ford pickup—parked butt end first in an open garage. A cross pole high in the trees supported the hanging carcasses of an elk and what looked like a heavily muscled man.

I started to point when Cody said, “Bear. Skinned bears look like if you hung a linebacker. It always creeped me out. Melissa, if I were you, I’d not let Angelina see that.”

“Luckily,” Melissa said from the back, “she’s looking out the other window at the horses.” Three horses, two mules, and a couple of goats watched us from a corral.

“Quite a place,” Melissa said, deadpan.

“About what I’d always expected,” I said.

Uncle Jeter greeted us at the front door with a cheese plate: dozens of overlarge squares of Velveeta hastily cut up on a chipped dinner plate with Ritz crackers piled up in a couple of columns and colored toothpicks bunched together by a rubber band. It struck me as incongruous and sweet that this man, after receiving Cody’s call, set about chopping little squares of cheese with a hunting knife for a snack.

Uncle Jeter was tall but not as tall as I remembered him, broad but not as wide as I recalled. In fact, he looked distressingly normal, except for the long beard striped with gray and the ponytail that fanned down half of his back. His eyes were the same, though—light blue-gray and piercing, set in hollows that were slightly red-tinged. His nose was large and beaky, complicated with hairlike blue veins. His hands were outsize and looked like mitts. He wore a heavy flannel shirt and a wool Filson vest so old it was shiny, tight Wranglers, and lace-up outfitter boots with heels for riding.

It was dark inside, the walls covered with tanned bear and elk hides. The antlers of mounted deer and elk served as gun racks for a dozen long rifles and shotguns. The place smelled of smoke, grease, and gun-cleaning solvent. Melissa, Angelina,
and I sat on an ancient leather couch with three-quarter wagon wheels on the ends for armrests. Melissa had a tough time keeping our daughter on the couch and not scrambling to the floor. Jeter set the cheese plate next to a six-pack of Molson beer on a coffee table.

“I’m sorry,” Uncle Jeter said in a gravelly voice to Melissa and Angelina as we entered. “This ain’t no place for a lady and a baby.”

“It’s fine,” Melissa said, flashing a tight-mouthed smile.

“No,” he said, “no it ain’t. Is there anything I can get the little one? Some milk or something?”

Melissa gestured to her overlarge baby bag, and said, “Not necessary—we came prepared.”

To our surprise, Angelina seemed to be charming him. She’d give him her silly demure look, bat her eyelashes, then cover her face with her hands. It wouldn’t be long before she’d spread her fingers and gaze at him through them, then giggle. I noticed that he had a tough time devoting his attention fully to Cody, who outlined our problem. Despite what Cody had said to us in the car, he didn’t indicate any doubt at all as he told his uncle Hoyt how Garrett and Luis had fouled our house and shot me with paintballs, how Garrett said he owned us now. When Cody told him about Harry, I saw Hoyt’s eyes turn hard.

When Cody was done, Uncle Jeter sat back and raked his fingers through his beard.

“So,” he said, “you’ve got a boy who needs scared, and you came to me to do it. Why?”

Cody deferred to me.

“Because you scared
us
.”

“That was twenty years ago, Jack.”

Cody leaned forward and handed his uncle the envelope of reports and photos Torkleson had given us. Jeter took it
and fanned through the photos of Garrett, while Cody said, “Because you’re not known in Denver, Uncle Jeter. You’ve got no priors down there. I know how things work with the police—where they’d look if something went bad. They wouldn’t look to Lincoln, Montana, unless you did something stupid like dropped your wallet.”

Or if the Browning Brothers and Chad Kerr in Lincoln were questioned,
I thought.

Uncle Jeter shot him a look that made me fear for Cody.

“Not that I’m saying something like that would happen,” Cody said, backtracking. “Or even that Garrett would go to the police. The point is for him
not
to go to the police. The point is for you to persuade him to sign his custody rights away.”

Hoyt raked his beard again, as if considering all of the odds. “I ain’t done too many things like this in the last few years,” he said. “I might be a little rusty. But you say this Garrett likes to associate with Mexicans, that it makes him feel like a big shot?”

Cody nodded. “Specifically, a gang called Sur-13.”

Uncle Jeter turned to Melissa. “I’m sorry, ma’am, would you want to take a few minutes and show the baby the horses outside? I got some horses and two fine mules out there. And a goat, a good goat. He don’t bite. Do you think that little angel might want to see them?”

Melissa looked at me, and I nodded.

As soon as the front door shut, Uncle Jeter said, “I got a problem with this illegal immigration. I got a big problem with the way them Mexicans are taking over our cities and flying the Mexican flag and all. A big problem, you understand me?”