Off the Grid Read online

  “Glad to.”

  Parker said that if Joe was headed south to Adobe Town, he might want to get going before it got too late. “Fire up your GPS,” Parker said. “There aren’t any good roads and the ones you find likely won’t be marked. I don’t want to hear about a guest getting lost out there and getting into trouble.”

  Joe wasn’t sure what to make of that last statement, but he shook Parker’s hand good-bye and watched as the game warden thanked Cooter and pecked Jan’s cheek on his way out. She didn’t react.

  • • •

  BEFORE HE WENT to the counter to pay, Joe pulled his cell phone out of his pocket to check messages and email. There were none of either, and he discovered the screen said: NO SERVICE.

  He opened his settings to find out that the Mustang Café didn’t have Wi-Fi available.

  “No Wi-Fi?” Joe asked Cooter as he handed him the bill and a credit card that Governor Rulon’s office had made available to him for expenses.

  “Nope. No cell phone reception, either. Sorry,” Cooter said. Then he pointed to a sign Joe had missed that read CASH ONLY.

  Joe handed over a twenty and a ten and asked for a receipt.

  As he waited for change, he glanced down the bar at Jan, who eyed him back. She was sipping hot tea and cupping something in her hands that she’d lowered and buried in her lap.

  “I feel like it’s 1964 around here,” he said to her.

  “I prefer 1968,” she said with a sly smile. “Ain’t it grand?”

  He smiled back like he knew what that meant.

  Then she withdrew her hands from her lap and put them on the bar. She was holding a paperback.

  “It’s odd seeing someone sitting on a stool not checking their phone,” he said. He realized he’d assumed that’s what she’d been doing with her back to them.

  “It’s known as a book,” she said.

  “I remember them.”

  “Edward Abbey,” she said. “Desert Solitaire. I just finished The Monkey Wrench Gang.”

  “This does seem like a place where George Washington Hayduke might show up.” He’d read the novel in college.

  Her eyes widened with recognition and surprise.

  “I guess all game wardens aren’t the same,” she said.

  When Cooter came back with change, Joe gave him a tip out of it. “Is there an ATM around?” he asked. “I’ll need to get more cash if I come back here.”

  “Rawlins,” Cooter said. Rawlins was forty-eight miles away.

  “Are you coming back?” Jan asked while raising her eyebrows.

  “Maybe.”

  She said, “I think I’d like that.”

  In response, he held up his left hand with his palm facing him so she could clearly see the gold wedding band. It had been there so long it had formed a groove in his finger.

  She grinned, said, “It’s never stopped me before,” and then turned back to her book.

  Again he thought: She doesn’t belong here.

  • • •

  IN HIS PICKUP, Joe located Adobe Town on the topo screen of his GPS and keyed it in. Daisy watched him as if it were the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen.

  As he did, he thought, She doesn’t belong here unless she’s one of Cooter’s silent partners. Next time he saw Phil Parker, he thought, he’d ask him about that.

  A dust devil swirled out on the Red Desert across the highway in the distance: rising, undulating, and dispersing until it was gone. Unlike his home country, the horizon wasn’t edged with blue mountains, but instead the terrain seemed to fade out into nothing. Far away on the desert floor, he could see dozens of tiny puffs of dust that confused him for a moment until he realized they were being kicked up by a small herd of pronghorn antelope running east to west at full speed. Their natural coloration blended almost perfectly with the beige-and-white topsoil, rendering them almost invisible. A lone coyote loped along in their wake. In the sky, a golden eagle was being dive-bombed and driven away by a much-smaller falcon guarding its hunting ground.

  He doubted that the drivers hurtling down the interstate even noticed the herd, the coyote, or the dogfight in the clouds. Like so many vistas in the state, Joe thought, it looked like a whole lot of nothing at first. But if one stopped and observed, really sat still for a few minutes and observed, there was a lot going on. The high-steppe desert was alive and complex.

  • • •

  HUGE EIGHTEEN-WHEELERS roared down I-80 and Joe joined their flow.

  As soon as he did, his cell phone vibrated while it loaded with messages and texts. When he looked at the screen, he saw the signal was strong.

  It was as if the Mustang Café was a bizarre step back in time and he had returned to modernity.

  Ain’t it grand, she’d said.

  14

  Joe rumbled his pickup down ungraded two-track dirt roads for the rest of the afternoon. After the roar of I-80 ceased, he continued another hour until he lost cell phone reception. Shortly after, the truck’s radio emitted only static and stray squawks of language, so he shut it off.

  The terrain was open, but not as flat and featureless as it had appeared to be from a distance. He drove through dry washes and arroyos, around huge red boulders, and for a while down the middle of a riverbed that only went live, it appeared, during flash floods. Through his open window, it smelled of dust and sage and the sunlight seemed raw, harsh, and unfiltered by trees.

  While he negotiated the back roads, he kept his eye out for Nate’s Jeep, a camp where he might be staying, or a falcon hunting in the sky. He knew that the Red Desert had a few hikers in the summer months, but there appeared to be no other humans in the fall despite the mild weather. Not even an energy exploration truck or seismograph crew.

  The wildlife he encountered—pronghorn antelope, coyotes, rabbits, a flock of sage grouse walking down the middle of the road that he had to brake for so he wouldn’t run them over—seemed surprised to see him but not necessarily skittish.

  • • •

  THE DEEPER HE DROVE into the desert, the closer he felt he was getting to Nate, although he had no good reason to feel that way. He’d found no tire tracks, no cold camps, no remains of falcon-killed prey. Nate had always had an uncanny ability to find him in the past, Joe thought, whether it was in the Bighorns or Yellowstone Park or the Teton Wilderness. Maybe this time it could work in reverse.

  His relationship with Nate Romanowski had changed and morphed over the years and Joe found himself reliving it as he drove in desert silence. He’d met Nate nearly a decade before, when the outlaw falconer had been arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. Joe had worked to free him, and after that Nate had pledged that he’d always be there to protect Joe’s family. It was a mixed blessing, and, over the years, the cumulative body count that had derived from that pledge was something Joe didn’t like to think about.

  Marybeth had a blind spot where Nate was concerned.

  No other man could rip the ears off other men and tear them limb from limb with his bare hands and still keep a specially reserved place in her heart, Joe knew. Nate was woven through the Pickett family history in a wild and unpredictable way. Sheridan had once been Nate’s apprentice in falconry. And he’d been there for Joe when Joe needed him.

  And Joe had been there for Nate when his friend went off the rails after he’d lost two lovers to violence and when he’d worked briefly for Wolfgang Templeton to “kill people who needed killing.” After that, Joe had urged his friend to turn himself in and testify against Templeton. Nate had also found Olivia Brannan, and she him.

  Maybe, Joe thought, Nate would need his help again. If so, he hoped he could be there.

  “Come on, buddy,” Joe said out loud. “Show yourself.”

  Daisy raised her head and looked at him.

  “Not you,” Joe said.

  • • �
��

  JOE HAD NEVER BEEN to the area known as Adobe Town, but he recognized it when he saw the spires, rock formations, and columns of stone balancing ten-ton rocks on their tops. In the late-afternoon light the feature was dramatic and looked as if it were on fire. Long shadows from the promontories striped the red sand and scrub.

  Getting closer on the two-track, he noted another dirt road, running north–south through the sage, that intersected the road he was on. As he drove over the crossroad, he leaned out his open window and saw the fresh tire tracks in the sandy soil.

  Joe stopped his pickup and got out. Daisy bounded behind him. He knelt down on the crossroad and studied the tracks carefully. They were fresh, made that morning, he thought. There had been no moisture or wind to degrade them and he could clearly see sharp tread marks in the loose sand. There were two and possibly three sets of individual tracks.

  He walked along the road, keeping to the side of it, and stepping over tightly coiled sagebrush and prickly-pear cactus. At a wide spot fifty yards from where he started, he could see the tracks diverge slightly.

  He said to Daisy, “A vehicle came from the south and the same vehicle went back. You can see that, right? And another unit with thinner, balder tires came from the north and went right over the top of them.”

  Daisy stood looking up at him and wagging her tail. She wanted him to throw something for her to retrieve.

  “My guess,” he said, “is that the first vehicle came up this road and then went back. Someone followed it in a second car. Jeeps have narrow tires, you know.”

  He put his hands on his hips and scanned the horizon in every direction. There was perhaps an hour left of sunlight. There was no way to know how far the vehicles that had made the tracks had gone or where they were headed. He knew he was close to the Colorado border to the south, and to the Utah border to the south and west. And he knew he was a long way from a paved road where he could make up time.

  Joe photographed the tracks with his cell phone and jotted down the coordinates in his notebook.

  “We can follow these tracks or set up camp before it gets dark. What do you think?”

  Daisy thought he should throw something for her to retrieve.

  So she’d quit staring at him and wagging her tail, he walked back to his pickup and dug a plastic dummy out from behind the seat and tossed it out into the desert.

  After ten minutes, he said to his panting dog, “Okay, get back in. We’ll follow them for a while, but we’ll get back here before it gets too late.”

  • • •

  MINUTES BEFORE he’d have to switch on his headlamps or his under-the-bumper “sneak lights” to see the road, Joe topped a long, gradual rise where he could look down into the big swale in front of him.

  There, a mile and a half away on the desert floor, was what looked like a long-abandoned ranch: a cluster of old buildings in the fading light in different stages of decline. He was surprised there was an old ranch at all, since all around him was federally owned Bureau of Land Management land, but there it was. Perhaps, he thought, the landowner had had some special deal at one time with the feds or the property had been grandfathered in after the BLM imposed their will.

  He was studying the layout of the property when he realized he was about to drive into a four-strand barbed-wire-fence gate that crossed the road, and he stopped short. He saw the chain and heavy combination lock on the gate when he got out to open it. Joe grasped the lock and gave it a yank. Sometimes landowners only appeared to lock up behind them. But no luck.

  He studied the road and he could see that two—not three—of the tracks had proceeded through the gate during the day. The vehicle had come and gone through it. But the set of thinner tracks he’d observed earlier was nowhere to be seen. He scanned the fence both ways and saw that, in fact, the driver or occupants of the second vehicle had driven about a hundred yards to the east and had pulled the staples out of two posts that held up the barbed wire. They’d probably lowered the strands, weighted them down with something heavy, and driven over them to continue pursuit. He couldn’t see anyplace where the second vehicle had come out.

  But when he looked over the old ranch complex, he saw no vehicles, no people, and no sign of occupancy. The buildings that still stood were dark and there were no power lines stretching across the desert to them.

  Joe didn’t want to trespass and follow. Not tonight, anyway. Instead, he attached his spotting scope to a tripod and opened it up on the hood of his pickup. Leaning into the eyepiece, he focused and moved his field of vision from building to building.

  There was no doubt the ranch was no longer in operation. What was left of a main house was a burned-out shell with a missing roof and broken windows. He could make out smoke stains above the window frames on the outside walls.

  An ancient outhouse behind the main house leaned hard to the left, and a small shed near it had collapsed in on itself.

  Four dead trees flanked the ruins. Trees couldn’t grow where there wasn’t any rain, he thought.

  Three very long sheds were parallel to each other across the ranch yard from the burned-out house. They were much bigger and longer than Joe had seen on other ranches, and he guessed they were used not only for equipment but for livestock. Probably, he guessed, the ranch had been a huge but failed sheep operation back when millions of sheep were raised in the state.

  So who had driven in and out of the abandoned ranch and locked the gate behind them? And who had followed and not come back?

  • • •

  IN THE FADING LIGHT, he moved the spotting scope slowly over the three sheds, hoping to spot the nose of a truck poking out of one of the openings or the driver moving about. A battered pre-1960s pickup with broken windows was all he saw.

  Then, barely in his field of vision, he thought he saw a flicker of light from behind a broken window from inside the middle shed. He leaned against the fender of his truck and tried to steady himself further so he could zoom the focus of the spotting scope down on the open window. He saw it again: a flicker of orange-red, as if someone had struck a match. A man’s face—dark features, hooked nose—was illuminated in pink for a few seconds while he lit a cigarette. It wasn’t Nate. Then the match was blown out, leaving a tiny red dot that was the lit end of the cigarette.

  The dot moved from window to window for a quarter length of the long shed and then vanished altogether.

  Joe kept the scope still and focused for ten minutes, trained on the distant windows. He didn’t see it again.

  • • •

  WHEN JOE CLIMBED back inside his pickup it was full dark. There wasn’t a single artificial light as far as he could see, and not even a wash of it on the horizon. The stars were creamy and deep and endless, and the old ranch buildings were no more than black shapes on a dark blue tableau.

  He kept his lights off as he backed up the hill and didn’t turn them on until he was a hundred yards down the other side. There was no good reason to reveal to the man in the shed that he’d been observed, Joe thought.

  • • •

  THE SMALL GREASEWOOD FIRE popped and smoked and made a sharp, bitter smell that Joe didn’t particularly like. But the few old twisted branches were the only fuel he could find at Adobe Town and he’d ranged the perimeter of his camp by headlamp.

  The fire was primarily for heat and light and it didn’t do a very good job of either. For dinner, he’d warmed a can of beef stew over his gas stove and it tasted much better than it should have, like everything did under the stars. Daisy was curled up a few feet away on the other side of the fire. Since he’d forgotten to pack dog food, she’d had a can of stew as well. Unheated.

  Joe knew that with Daisy’s hardwired bouts of Labrador flatulence, he’d likely pay for forgetting dog food later in the night.

  He’d pitched his one-man tent on the desert floor with the opening aimed at the fire a
nd he’d unrolled his sleeping bag inside. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since the sun had gone down, but it didn’t feel like it would freeze during the night. Still, he wore his jacket over his Filson vest and had set up his Crazy Creek camp chair so he didn’t have to sit directly on the cold desert ground.

  Joe grabbed a handful of ice from his Yeti cooler and sipped from a tin cup of bourbon and water. He thought about the sheep ranch. He came to no conclusions.

  His shotgun was across his knees.

  • • •

  IT FELT LIKE MIDNIGHT, but it was only eight-thirty when Joe powered up the satellite phone and called Marybeth at home.

  She answered tentatively. “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Oh, good. I didn’t recognize the number.”

  “It’s a sat phone. Where I’m at, there’s no radio or cell signal.”

  “Sometimes I wish I could be in that place,” she said. Then: “No, I don’t. It would drive me crazy.”

  She told him about her day and the editorial in the Saddlestring Roundup written by managing editor T. Cletus Glatt, who opposed the library bond issue and urged residents to vote against it.

  “He actually said, and I quote, ‘Why do we even need libraries since we have the Internet? Libraries are only good for employing people who can’t get a real job.’ Can you believe that?” she asked angrily.

  “Unfortunately, I can,” Joe said.

  She said she’d fed the horses and walked Tube, and the weather was so nice she planned to ride in the morning.

  “So what are you doing now?” he asked.

  “I’m home alone. Lucy is at the high school football game . . .”

  He’d forgotten it was Friday night.

  “. . . and April is out on a date, although she didn’t call it that.”

  “A date?”

  It didn’t need to be said that this was the first time she’d gone out with a boy since her injuries and hospitalization.

  “I think it’s a good thing,” Marybeth said. “She’s finally starting to get past all of that.”