In Plain Sight Page 14

  “No, thank you,” Sheridan said.

  “Good night,” Arlen said, stepping aside as she sidled around the counter and headed for the doorway.

  “ ’Night,” she replied. She was close enough to Bill Monroe as she passed to smell him—tobacco smoke, dust, and bad sweet cologne.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Bill Monroe said to her back.

  As she went up the stairs, she looked over her shoulder to see him watching her carefully, a hint of a smile on his lips, and for a second it felt as if a bolt of electricity had shot through her.

  WHEN SHE AWOKE she could hear Julie still sleeping beside her, a burr of a snore in her breathing. Her dreams had been awful, once she finally got to sleep. In one, a vivid dream, Bill Monroe was outside their house, on the lawn, looking through the window at Lucy and her as they slept.

  In another dream, Sheridan went back out into the hallway in the dark to where the window was and parted the curtain. A yellow square could be seen through the distant trees, the light from Wyatt’s chicken coop.

  She raised the eyepieces of the binoculars to her eyes and adjusted the focus tight on the square. Then something or somebody passed by the window inside, blocking out the light like a finger waved in front of a candle flame. And when the person passed, she could see the slightly smiling face of a woman, her expression paused in mid-conversation.

  It was Opal Scarlett.

  15

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, IN THE CHILLED HIGH-ALTITUDE predawn, J. W. Keeley labored up a rocky hillside on the western slope of Wolf Mountain with a bucket full of creek water in each hand. He walked carefully, the soles of his Docs slick in the dew on the grass, trying not to slosh water on his pant legs.

  When he reached his pickup he lowered the buckets to the ground, then rubbed his gloved hands together hard, trying to work the soreness out of them from the bucket handles. It would be a little while before the sun broke over the mountain and he could see well enough to finish up.

  While he waited, he leaned over the hood of his pickup and raised the binoculars to his eyes. Over a mile away were the house, the garage, the little barn, the single blue pole light. As the sky lightened, the white picket fence around the front lawn began to emerge. He couldn’t see much behind the place yet. He knew there was a steep hill, and a red-rock arroyo back there.

  Inside the house, the family slept. Except for the oldest girl, of course. She was still at the Thunderhead Ranch.

  Keeley lowered the field glasses and used the back of his glove to soak up the snot running out of his nose. He would never get used to the cold, he thought. Even when it should be nearly summer, when the grass was coming up and the trees were budding, it still dipped below freezing most nights. Sure, it got warm fast once the sun came out. In fact, it heated up so quickly and with such thin-air intensity that he found himself short of breath at times. It felt as if there were nothing between him and that sun, nothing to mute the heat and light. Like air, for example.

  He wished it weren’t so far down the slope to the little creek. He’d need to make a few more trips with those buckets. He had a mess to clean up. The bed of his pickup was wet and sticky with blood and clumps of hair.

  MORE THAN ONCE since he’d been in the Bighorns, he thought about that cowboy in the Shirley Basin, the one he’d shot. When he recalled that morning, he shook his head and looked at the ground, not out of remorse but because an act like that was such a bold and reckless chance to take. A smile would break across his face and he had to make sure no one was looking, because he was infused with the kind of raw dark joy that he’d felt only once before in his life, with that hunter from Atlanta and his wife.

  But that cowboy, well, maybe that had not been the smartest thing. There was a highway within view, and someone could have seen him. Hell, there could have been someone in the cowboy’s truck, waiting for him. Keeley hadn’t checked out that possibility at the time.

  That he had just raised the rifle and shot the way he did, as easy as it was, as slick as it was, man . . .

  Maybe it was smart after all, he figured. Anyone investigating the shooting would look at the cowboy’s friends and family, try to figure out who didn’t like him, whom he owed money to, that sort of thing. The randomness of the act accomplished a couple of things. It reminded Keeley that he had ultimate power over those who fucked with him. Anybody could get angry, or let himself be insulted. But it took someone with big brass balls to do anything about it. Recalling that morning made him think harder about what he was doing, and what he was about to do. He couldn’t be impulsive again, for one thing. No more lashing out, no outbursts. He had to be cool and smart.

  That was the difference, after all, between him and those assholes in Rawlins, even the late Wacey Hedeman. Damn, he wished he’d been there to see that, when Wacey took his last chew. It wasn’t quite the same thrill when it happened offstage, even though in the end the result was the same.

  LUCK WAS HIS lady, though. Luck and cool and a purpose. They’d all come together, like whiskey, ice, and water to form something perfect. For five long hot years at Parchman Farm, Mississippi’s only maximum security prison, he’d had to just fucking sit there and stew. The more the rage built inside, the colder he got on the outside. He’d learned about what happened to his brother Ote through a letter from their mother. Two years later, after Mama died, he found out about Jeannie and April from his shit-for-brains lawyer. While he cooled his heels at Parchman Farm, what remained of his family was being taken from him one by one and there was nothing he could do about it. His frustration and anger was white-hot, and in some ways it was the purest emotion he’d ever felt. But he channeled it, tucked it inside himself. And waited. His reward for holding his emotion in, he felt, was coming now. Events were finally breaking in his favor. Getting hired by Hank Scarlett within a day of hitting town, what was the likelihood of that? Plus, Keeley knew how this small-town stuff worked. Normally, he would have attracted a little bit of attention, being so different and all. But two things were happening. One, the coal-bed methane companies were hiring just about any warm body they could find, so there were lots of new faces in town. Hard men, like himself. Many were from the South, like him. Second, the feud between Hank and Arlen took center stage in Twelve Sleep County, and the new men Hank was hiring were lumped into the category of thugs. No one cared about the individual makeup of Hank’s private little army, just the fact that the army existed.

  Keeley couldn’t imagine any other scenario in which he could have been hired as a ranch hand with practically no ranching experience. The closest he’d ever come to cows, he thought, was eating a cheeseburger. But Hank had looked him over the way a coach evaluates on-field talent, said the word sinewy, then asked his name.

  “Bill Monroe,” Keeley had said, thinking of the first name that popped into his head.

  “Bill Monroe,” Hank repeated, “you’ve got yourself a job.”

  One of these days, Keeley thought, somebody was going to be a bluegrass fan and ask him twice about his name. But so far it hadn’t happened.

  THERE HAD BEEN that morning two weeks ago, Keeley recalled, when he watched Joe Pickett through the scope of his rifle and nearly pulled the trigger. Hank had sent him out to drive the fence line and check the locks. The game warden was out counting deer when Keeley saw the familiar green pickup. Hunkering down in a tangle of brush, Keeley placed the crosshairs of the rifle scope on Joe Pickett’s nose.

  The game warden seemed to sense he was being watched, the way he looked around. But he never saw Keeley.

  It would have been simple. Easier than the cowboy. The game warden would never even know what hit him. Keeley had flipped the safety off, pressed his cheek harder into the stock of the rifle, and begun to squeeze the tigger . . .

  Then he thought better of it. That was the problem; it was way too easy. He didn’t want to kill him from a distance, without Pickett knowing who had done it or why. The why was important.

  Even the week
before, when he had Joe Pickett down on the pavement behind the Stockman bar, it would have been easy to stomp him to death. Hank couldn’t have stopped him.

  But he didn’t want to just kill the man. He wanted to destroy him first. That would take more time.

  IT HAD BEEN quite a surprise to meet Joe Pickett’s daughter the night before, Keeley thought. She was kind of a little cutie, he had to admit. Too bad he couldn’t see her better, but she was all wrapped up in that blanket that way.

  How old did Arlen say she was? Fourteen? That would be about right.

  Then he thought: April Keeley would be twelve if she were alive today.

  But she wasn’t.

  And he knew who was responsible for that.

  IT HADN’T TAKEN Keeley long to size up the situation on the Thunderhead Ranch. It was Hank versus Arlen, and Hank was hiring. Hank’s employees would be expected to do a hell of a lot more than ranch work if it came to it. There were standing orders to confront any of Arlen’s men if they were stupid enough to cross over to the east side of the ranch for anything. There had already been a few spitting contests of sorts, with Hank’s men threatening Arlen’s men and vice versa. Keeley had taken out some dumb Mexican irrigator who was working for Arlen. The Mexican never even knew what hit him. He just woke up in Twelve Sleep County Medical with a concussion from a two-by-four.

  Keeley was lying low since he’d thumped the game warden. By working for Hank in the open and Arlen behind the scenes, Keeley had assured himself he would be in the middle of anything that happened between the two brothers, and he might be able to use his unique position to manipulate the outcome. He knew he had stumbled upon a great opportunity. And not only was he smarter than those dick-weeds down in Rawlins, Keeley thought, he was also smarter than those two brothers.

  NATE ROMANOWSKI. KEELEY had heard the name spoken in quiet tones enough times around the ranch and in the bars in town that he was concerned. This Romanowski guy was a friend of Joe Pickett’s and he wasn’t someone to screw around with. He was rumored to be behind the murders of two men, one being the former county sheriff. Hank said he’d heard Romanowski carried a .454 Casull handgun made by Freedom Arms, the second-most-powerful pistol on earth, and he could hit what he was aiming at up to a mile away.

  But Romanowski was nowhere to be found. No one had seen him in six months, and with the outlaw falconer gone or missing, Keeley knew it would be easier to get to the game warden.

  KEELEY WAS RINSING off his knife and bone saw in one of the buckets when he noticed movement at the house on Bighorn Road. Yup, someone had turned on the porch light.

  He put the saw and knife on the tailgate of his truck, wiped his hands dry on his jeans, and picked up the binoculars again. He focused on the front door.

  AT THE SAME moment on the Thunderhead Ranch, there was a shout.

  “Girls, time to get up,” Arlen called from downstairs. “What do you want for breakfast?”

  Julie moaned and rubbed her eyes. “Are you hungry, Sherry?”

  “No,” Sheridan said, rolling over, feeling the hardness of the steak knife under the sleeping bag where she’d hidden it the night before. “I had a really bad dream. I just want to go home.”

  Which was true.

  As Julie dressed, Sheridan peeled back the bag and looked at the knife in the morning light, feeling suddenly sick. She let the flap drop back over it before Julie could see what she had been doing.

  “You don’t look good,” Julie said, looking over while she brushed her hair. “Your face is completely white.”

  “I don’t feel very good all of a sudden.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Sheridan hesitated. Should she tell her? She knew at that moment that no matter what, things would never be the same between her and Julie Scarlett.

  No, she decided, she couldn’t tell her that the knife she’d taken from the kitchen matched the one that had pinned the Miller’s weasel to her front door.

  16

  “I’LL GET THE PAPER IF YOU’LL MAKE COFFEE,” JOE said to Marybeth as he yawned, snapped on the porch light, and looked outside through the window on the front door.

  “You’ve got yourself a deal,” Marybeth said from the kitchen. Then: “You’re up early.”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, sitting on a bench to pull on his boots.

  “What were you worried about?” she asked.

  He smiled. She knew him so well. If he couldn’t sleep it was because he was concerned about something. Nothing else ever kept him awake.

  “I hope it wasn’t Sheridan’s sleepover,” Marybeth said.

  Joe had to proceed cautiously here. In fact, it had been about Sheridan’s sleepover. He kept thinking his daughter was in over her head with the Scarletts, but that she would never admit it. Something was brewing besides coffee, he thought.

  “Just a lot of things,” Joe said.

  He clamped on his cowboy hat and cinched the belt on his bathrobe against the morning chill and was three strides down the cracked concrete pathway in his front yard when he realized he was being watched. He froze, and felt the hair on his neck stand on end.

  He looked quickly at the road. There were no vehicles on it, and no one was parked. Wolf Mountain, still in shadow, loomed to the north, dominating the view. Then he felt more than saw something in his peripheral vision. Something big and black, hanging above the ground. Joe snapped his head to the side.

  Then to the other side.

  For a moment, he thought he was surrounded and he wished he’d brought his weapon.

  He realized what it was, and his stomach surged and he felt sick.

  Four elk heads—the Town Elk—had been mounted on the posts of his picket fence, facing inward toward his lawn. Toward him. The tongue of the big bull elk stuck out the side of its mouth, pink and dry. All eight cold black eyes were open.

  Joe tried to swallow, but couldn’t.

  Whoever had done this had hit him where he lived in more ways than one. Not only had he killed and beheaded four popular animals in Saddlestring that he was responsible for, but he’d brought the heads out to his own home and stuck them on posts to taunt him. To humiliate him. To frighten him and his family. He was telling Joe nothing was off-limits, and that he didn’t fear or respect him. He was bringing it right to him, and shoving it in his face in front of his family.

  He was disgusted as well as angry. Who in the hell was he up against who would do something like this?

  “Joe?” Marybeth was at the door.

  His first impulse was to run back and physically turn her around before she could see the heads.

  “Oh My God,” she whispered. “Joe . . .”

  He was too late.

  In the distance, above the thumping of his own heart and Marybeth’s gasps, he could hear an engine start up. They were being watched by someone, all right.

  Unfortunately, Wolf Mountain was covered by a spider’s web of old logging roads. Unless he knew specifically where the vehicle had been parked, he would never be able to track the driver or drivers down.

  “Who is doing this to us?” Marybeth asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Joe, what can we do about it?”

  “I don’t know that either,” he said.

  “I hope you get rid of those things before Lucy gets up and sees them.”

  Joe nodded.

  “This is awful,” she said. “It’s getting worse.”

  “Yup.”

  “What if he doesn’t stop?”

  Joe went to Marybeth and took her in his arms.

  “Joe, what if he doesn’t?” she said into his shoulder.

  “He’ll stop,” Joe said, with no confidence in his words.

  A FEW MINUTES later, Marybeth came out the front door again to find her husband walking across the lawn in his robe, cowboy hat, and boots, holding a severed elk head aloft by the antlers.

  “Come in and get dressed, Joe,” she said, distressed. “Look at yourself. Wh
at if someone drives by and sees you?”

  Instead of answering, Joe held the head up. “This really pisses me off, Marybeth.”

  “Come in, Joe . . .”

  JOE WAITED FOR the dispatcher to patch him through to the sheriff, who was having morning coffee with the rest of the “morning men” at the Saddlestring Burg-O-Pardner.

  He drawled, “Sheriff McLanahan. What can I do you for, Joe?”

  “Somebody cut the heads off of four elk and stuck them on my fence,” Joe said. “They were the Town Elk. All four of them.”

  “Jeez,” McLanahan said. “I was beginning to really like those critters.”

  “They’re all dead now. You want to come look at them?”

  “Naw,” McLanahan said. “That ain’t necessary. I seen plenty of elk heads before. Shoot, they’re on just about every wall in town!”

  “Now they’re in my yard.”

  “That’s not very neighborly.”

  “No, it’s not very neighborly,” Joe said, loud enough for Marybeth to hear. She looked up and grimaced. “Sheriff, it wasn’t neighbors. It was the same guy who pinned that Miller’s weasel on my door. He’s upping the ante.”

  “Are you sure it was the same guy? How do you know that?”

  “It has to be.”

  “So you’re speculating,” McLanahan said, pronouncing it “speck-u-late-un.”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “I don’t rightly know.”

  “You ‘don’t rightly know,’” Joe repeated, feeling his neck flush hot.

  Marybeth stood in the doorway, listening to Joe, shaking her head as if to say, This valley is getting too small for us.

  KNOWING HE WOULD need a front-end loader to dig a hole deep and wide enough to dispose of the massive elk heads, Joe angrily carried three of them into the back of his truck and drove them deep into the timber of Wolf Mountain, where he disposed of them. Although insects and predators would make short work of the hide, flesh, and soft parts, leaving only the skulls and antlers, the act of dumping the heads like bags of garbage went against everything he stood for. The last head he’d dragged behind his garage and covered with a tarp to ship to state forensics. It was possible, although not probable, that they could find a human hair or fiber that could lead them to the killer.