Below Zero jp-9 Read online

  The man—she knew him as Robert—was in his mid-thirties. He was handsome and he knew it with his blond hair with the expensive highlights and his ice-cold green eyes and his small, sharp little nose. But he was shrill for a man his age, she thought, and had yet to be very friendly to her. Not that he’d been cruel. It was obvious, though, that he’d rather have Stenko’s undivided attention. Robert said, “He told you not to watch.”

  “But why is he taking, like, big potatoes from them?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  Robert turned and pierced her with those eyes. “They’ll act as silencers and muffle the shots.”

  “The shots?” She shifted in the back seat so she could see through the windshield better between the front seats. Up the hill, Stenko had turned his back to the old couple and was jamming a big potato on the end of a long-barreled pistol. Before she could speak, Stenko wheeled and swung the weapon up and there were two coughs and the old man fell down. The potato had burst and the pieces had fallen so Stenko jammed the second one on. There were two more coughs and the woman dropped out of sight behind the picnic table.

  The girl screamed and balled her fists in her mouth.

  “SHUT UP!” Robert said, “For God’s sake, shut up.” To himself, I knew bringing a girl along was a bad idea. I swear to God I can’t figure out what goes on in that brain of his.

  She’d seen killing, but she couldn’t believe what had happened. Stenko was so nice. Did he know the old couple? Did they say or do something that he felt he had to defend himself? A choking sob broke through.

  Robert said, “He should have left you in Chicago.”

  SHE COULDN’T STOP CRYING and peeking even though Robert kept telling her to shut up and not to watch as Stenko dragged the two bodies up into the motor home. When the bodies were inside Stenko closed the door. He was in there a long time before tongues of flame licked the inside of the motor home windows and Stenko jogged down the path toward the SUV.

  She smelled smoke and gasoline on his clothes when he climbed into the cab and started the motor.

  “Man,” he said, “I hated doing that.”

  Robert said, “Move out quick before the fire gets out of control and somebody notices us. Keep cool, drive the speed limit all the way out of here . . .”

  She noticed how panicked Robert’s tone was, how high his voice was. For the first time she saw that his scalp through his hair was glistening with sweat. She’d never noticed how thin his hair was and how skillfully he’d disguised it.

  Stenko said, “That old couple—they were kind of sweet.”

  “It had to be done,” Robert said quickly.

  “I wish I could believe you.”

  Robert leaned across the console, his eyes white and wild. “Trust me, Dad. Just trust me. Did they give you the numbers?”

  Stenko reached into his breast pocket and flipped the spiral notebook toward Robert. “It’s all there,” he said. The girl thought Stenko was angry.

  Robert flipped through the pad, then drew his laptop out of the computer case near his feet. He talked as he tapped the keys. “Sixty to eighty thousand miles a year at eight to ten miles per gallon. Wow. They’ve been at it for five years and planned to keep it up until they couldn’t. They’re both sixty-five, so we could expect them to keep driving that thing for at least ten to fifteen years, maybe more.” Tap-tap-tap.

  “They were farmers from Iowa,” Stenko said sadly. “Salt of the earth.”

  “Salt of the earth?” Robert said. “You mean plagues on the earth! Christ, Dad, did you see that thing they were driving?”

  “They called it The Unit,” Stenko said.

  “Wait until I get this all calculated,” Robert said. “You just took a sizable chunk out of the balance.”

  “I hope so,” Stenko said.

  “Any cash?”

  “Of course. All farmers have cash on hand.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty-seven hundred I found in the cupboard. I have a feeling there was more, but I couldn’t take the time. I could have used your help in there.”

  “That’s not what I do.”

  Stenko snorted. “I know.”

  “Thirty-seven hundred isn’t very much.”

  “It’ll keep us on the road.”

  “There’s that,” Robert said, but he didn’t sound very impressed.

  As they cleared the campground, the girl turned around in her seat. She could see the wink of orange flames in the alcove of pines now. Soon, the fire would engulf the motor home and one of the people in the campground would see it and call the fire department. But it would be too late to save the motor home, just as it was too late to save that poor old couple. As she stared at the motor home on fire, things from deep in her memory came rushing back and her mouth dropped open.

  “I said,” Stenko pressed, looking at her in the rearview mirror, “you didn’t watch, did you? You promised me you wouldn’t watch.”

  “She lied,” Robert said. “You should have left her in Chicago.”

  “Damn, honey,” Stenko said. “I didn’t want you to watch.”

  But she barely heard him through the roaring in her ears. Back it came, from where it had been hiding and crouching like a night monster in a dark corner of her memory.

  The burning trailer. Screams. Shots. Snow.

  And a telephone number she’d memorized but that had remained buried in her mind just like all of those people were buried in the ground all these years . . .

  She thought: I need to find a phone.

  2

  Saddlestring, Wyoming

  FIVE DAYS LATER, ON A SUN-FUSED BUT MELANCHOLY SUNDAY afternoon before the school year began again the next day, seventeen-year-old Sheridan Pickett and her twelve-year-old sister, Lucy, rode double bareback in a grassy pasture near the home they used to live in. Their summer-blond hair shone in the melting sun, and their bare sunburned legs dangled down the sides of their old paint horse, Toby, as he slowly followed an old but well-trammeled path around the inside of the sagging three-rail fence. The ankle-high grass buzzed with insects, and grasshoppers anticipated the oncoming hooves by shooting into the air like sparks. He was a slow horse because he chose to be; he’d never agreed with the concept that he should be ridden, even if his burden was light, and considered riding to be an interruption of his real pursuits, which consisted of eating and sleeping. As he walked, he held his head low and sad and his heavy sighs were epic. When he revealed his true nature by snatching a big mouthful of grass when Sheridan’s mind wandered, she pulled up on the reins and said, “Damn you, Toby!”

  “He always does that,” Lucy said behind her sister. “All he cares about it eating. He hasn’t changed.”

  “He’s always been a big lunkhead,” Sheridan said, keeping the reins tight so he would know she was watching him this time, “but I’ve always kind of liked him. I missed him.”

  Lucy leaned forward so her cheek was against Sheridan’s back. Her head was turned toward the house they used to live in before they’d moved eight miles into the town of Saddlestring a year before.

  Sheridan looked around. The place hadn’t changed much. The gravel road paralleled the fence. Farther, beyond the road, the landscape dipped into a willow-choked saddle where the Twelve Sleep River branched out into six fingers clogged with beaver ponds and brackish mosquito-heaven eddies and paused for a breath before its muscular rush through and past the town of Saddlestring. Beyond were the folds of the valley as it arched and suddenly climbed to form a precipitous mountain-face known as Wolf Mountain in the Twelve Sleep Range.

  “I never thought I’d say I missed this place,” Lucy said.

  “But you do,” Sheridan finished.

  “No, not really,” Lucy giggled.

  “You drive me crazy.”

  “What can I say?” Lucy said. “I like people around. I like being able to ride my bike to school and not take that horrible bus.”

  �
��You’re a townie.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Townie’s are . . . common. Everybody’s a townie. There’s nothing special about it.”

  Lucy affected a snooty, Valley Girl inflection: “Yeah, I’m like, common. I should want to still live out here so I can curse at horses, like you. You’re the weird one, Sheridan. I keep telling you that but you don’t believe me.” She flicked a grasshopper off her wrist. “And I don’t constantly have bugs landing on me.”

  “Stop talking, Lucy.”

  Lucy sighed, mimicking Toby. “How long do you think Mom is going to be in there?”

  “A long time, I hope,” Sheridan said.

  Marybeth Pickett, Sheridan and Lucy’s mother, had brought them both out to their old house on the Bighorn Road. Their mom owned a business-consulting firm, and she was meeting with Mrs. Kiner, who was starting a bath and body products company using honey or wax or something. Phil Kiner was the game warden of the Saddlestring District, the district their dad used to manage. Because of that, the Kiners took over the state-owned home that was once occupied by the Picketts when the family moved to their Grandmother Missy’s ranch for a year, and then to town to a home of their own. Toby had been one of their horses growing up, and when Sheridan saw him standing lazily in the corral, she’d asked if she could ride him around until their mother was done. Lucy tagged along simply because she didn’t want to wait inside and listen to business talk.

  “I’m getting hungry,” Lucy said.

  “You’re always hungry,” Sheridan said. “You’re like Toby. You’re like his lazy spawn.”

  “Now you shut up,” Lucy said.

  “Lucy Pickett,” Sheridan said in an arena announcer’s cadence, “Lazy Hungry Spawn of Toby! I like the sound of that.”

  In response, Lucy leaned forward and locked her hands together under Sheridan’s breasts and squeezed her sister’s ribs as hard as she could. “I’ll crush you,” Lucy said.

  “You wish,” Sheridan laughed.

  They rode in silence for a moment after Lucy gave up trying to crush Sheridan.

  Said Lucy, “I miss Dad. I miss his pancakes on Sunday morning.”

  Sheridan said, “Me, too.”

  “What’s going to happen? Is he ever moving back? Are we moving where he is now?”

  Sheridan glanced at the house where her mother was and shrugged, “Who knows? He says he’s in exile.”

  “It sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It sucks big-time.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “It sucks the big one.”

  “Okay, Lucy, I got it.”

  “Ooooh,” Lucy said, “I see your boyfriend. I knew he was going to come out and stare at you.”

  “Stop it.”

  Jason Kiner, like Sheridan, was set to be a junior at Saddlestring High School. He’d come home from football practice a half hour before in his ancient pickup. He was tall, dull-eyed, and wide-shouldered with shaved temples and a shock of black hair on top, something all the players had done to show their solidarity to . . . whatever. He had seen Sheridan and Lucy when he drove up in his old pickup but pretended he hadn’t. Playing it cool, Sheridan thought, a trait in boys her age she found particularly annoying. He’d parked near the detached garage, slung his gym bag over his shoulder, and gone into the house.

  He emerged now wearing a Saddlestring Wranglers gray hoodie, clean jeans, and white Nikes. He’d spiked his hair. Jason ambled toward the fence in a self-conscious, half-comatose saunter. Waved at them, nonchalant, and leaned forward on the fence with his forearms on the top rail and a Nike on the bottom rail. Trying to make an entrance of sorts, Sheridan thought. They were riding the horse toward the corner of the corral where Jason was waiting. It would be a minute before they’d be upon him.

  “There he is,” Lucy whispered.

  “I see him. So what?”

  “Jason Kiner looooves you.”

  “Shut up. He does not.”

  “I’ve looked at his MySpace page and his Facebook page,” she whispered. “He looooves you.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Look at him,” Lucy whispered, giggling. “There’s loooove in his eyes.”

  With the arm Jason couldn’t see, Sheridan elbowed her sister in the ribs, and Lucy laughed, “You’ve gotta do better than that.”

  When Toby sleepwalked to Jason, Sheridan said, “Hi there.”

  “How are you guys doing?” Jason said. “I didn’t see you when I drove up.”

  “You didn’t?” Lucy asked, mock serious.

  Sheridan gritted her teeth and shot a look over her shoulder at her sister, who looked back with her best innocent and charming face.

  “It’s been a long time since I rode,” Sheridan said. “We asked your mom.”

  Jason shrugged. “Nobody ever rides him anymore, so you might as well. I’ve been thinking about saddling him up, but with football practice and all . . .”

  And the conversation went completely and unexpectedly dead. Sheridan could hear the insects buzz in the grass. She could feel Lucy prodding her to say something.

  Finally, Jason’s face lit up with purpose. “Hey—did that chick call you?”

  “What chick?”

  “She called here a few days ago for you. She still had this number from when you lived here, I guess. I gave her your cell phone number.”

  Lucy purred into Sheridan’s ear, “He has your cell phone number?”

  Sheridan ignored her. “Nobody called. Who was it?”

  “I didn’t know her,” Jason said, “She said she used to live here and still had the number for the house.”

  “What was her name?”

  Jason screwed up his mouth and frowned. “She said it, but I can’t remember for sure. It was a few days ago. Oh—I remember now. She said something like, ‘April.’ ”

  Sheridan dropped the reins in to the grass. “What?”

  Jason shrugged. “She said something like, ‘I wonder if she remembers a girl named April.’ Anyway, I gave her your number and . . .”

  Lucy said to Sheridan, “Did he say what I thought he said?”

  Sheridan leaned forward and felt Lucy grip her hard to keep her balance. “Jason, this isn’t very funny.”

  “Who’s trying to be funny?”

  “If you are,” Sheridan said, “I’ll kill you.”

  Jason stepped back and dropped his arms to his sides as if preparing to be rushed by the two girls. “What’s going on? What’s wrong with you two? You act like you see a ghost or something.”

  Sheridan pointed toward the yard in front of the house but had trouble speaking. Jason turned to where she gestured.

  The three Austrian pine trees their dad had planted so long ago in the front yard had all now grown until the tops were level with the gutter of the house. At the time they’d been planted, he’d joked that they were Sheridan’s Tree, April’s Tree, and Lucy’s Tree.

  “April was our sister,” Sheridan said, pointing at the middle one. “She was killed six years ago.”

  The door of the house opened, and their mother came out. Sheridan noted how Jason looked over his shoulder at her in a way that in other circumstances would have made her proud and angry at the same time. But now her mother looked stricken. There was no doubt in Sheridan’s mind that Jason’s mom had just mentioned the call they’d received.

  3

  Baggs, Wyoming

  WYOMING GAME WARDEN JOE PICKETT, HIS RIGHT ARM and uniform shirt slick with his own blood, slowed his green Ford pickup as he approached a blind corner on the narrow two-track that paralleled the Little Snake River. It was approaching dusk in the deep river canyon, and buttery shafts filtered through the trees on the rim of the canyon and lit up the floor in a pattern resembling jail bars. The river itself, which had been roaring with runoff in the spring and early summer, was now little more than a series of rock-rimmed pools of pocket water connected by an anemic trickle. He couldn’t help notice, though, that b
rook trout were rising in the pools, feverishly slurping at tiny fallen Trico bugs like drunks at last call.

  There was a mature female bald eagle in the bed of his pickup bound up tight in a Wyoming Cowboys sweatshirt, and the bird didn’t like that he’d slowed down. Her hair-raising screech scared him and made him involuntarily jerk on the wheel.

  “Okay,” he said, glancing into his rearview mirror at the eagle, which stared back at him with murderous, needle-sharp eyes that made his skin creep. “You’ve done enough damage already. What—you want me to crash into the river, too?”

  He eased his way around the blind corner, encountered no one, and sped up. The road was so narrow—with the river on one side and the canyon wall on the other—that if he had to share it with an oncoming vehicle, they’d both have to maneuver for a place to pull over in order to pass. Instead, he shared the road with a doe mule deer and her fawn that had come down from a cut in the wall for water. Both deer ran ahead of him on the road, looking nervously over their shoulders, until another screech from the eagle sent them bounding through the river and up the other side.

  Another blind corner, but this time when he eased around it, he came face-to-face with a pickup parked in the center of the two-track. The vehicle was a jacked-up 2008 Dodge Ram 4x4, Oklahoma plates, the grille a sneering grimace. And no one in the cab. He braked and scanned the river for a fisherman—nope—then up the canyon wall on his right for the driver. No one.

  He knew instinctively, Something is going to happen here.

  THE CALL THAT brought him to this place on this road in this canyon had come via dispatch in Cheyenne just after noon: hikers had reported an injured bald eagle angrily hopping around in a remote campsite far up the canyon, “scaring the bejesus out of everyone.” They reported the eagle had an arrow sticking out of it. It was the kind of call that made him wince and made him angry.

  Months before, Joe had been assigned to the remote Baggs District in extreme south-central Wyoming. The district (known within the department as either “The Place Where Game Wardens Are Sent to Die” or “Warden Graveyard”) was hard against the Colorado border and encompassed the Sierra Madre Mountains, the Little Snake River Valley, dozens of third- and fourth-generation ranches surrounded by a bustling coal-bed methane boom and an influx of energy workers, and long distances to just about anywhere. The nearest town with more than 500 people was Craig, Colorado, thirty-six miles to the south. The governor had his reasons for making the assignment: to hide him away until the heat and publicity of the events from the previous fall died down. Joe understood Governor Rulon’s thinking. After all, even though he’d solved the rash of murders involving hunters across the state of Wyoming, he’d also permitted the unauthorized release of a federal prisoner—Nate Romanowski—as well as committing a shameful act that haunted him still.