Force of Nature Read online

  His clothing crackled as he peeled it off, because blood had dried through to his skin. He tossed each item into the middle of the river so it would float downstream, undulating in the current and over rocks, ending up who knew where: the Fitzpatrick Wilderness Area, Crowheart, or back home on the Wind River Reservation. Maybe his wretched clothing would be trapped beneath the heavy ice for the winter, washing the blood away, diluting the dissolving blood and fluids with startlingly clean and cold mountain water.

  Snowflakes landed on his bare skin like icy fly bites.

  The river itself was so cold it burned his skin and made him gasp. He waded in above his knees until the current upset his balance and his feet slipped on the smooth tops of the river rocks and he sat backward and went under. The tumbled silence underneath was awesome.

  For twenty long and silent seconds, he bounced along the riverbed on his back and butt, naked feet out ahead of him, arms out to the side, eyes closed. As the river cleansed his flesh and the cold numbed all feeling, he briefly forgot about the blood that flowed from ripping a man’s ears off, the muffled pop from twisting his victim’s nose sidewise until the nostrils looked up at his cheek, the dull, dry cracking sounds of fingers being snapped back one by one, the undignified screaming, the unholy crunch of shinbones being stove in.

  And when he emerged from the Wind River howling and trembling and thirty yards from where he’d left his duffel bag of clean dry clothes upstream, he fought back the depraved and exhilarating sense of yarak that had engorged him until he’d have to summon it back again.

  SHE WAS STILL staring at the snow-covered windshield when he climbed back into the Jeep. He’d found an old pair of jeans in his duffel as well as a dark green wool tactical sweater from the old days to wear. He closed the car door and sat in silence for a few minutes, letting the heat from the vents warm his body until his muscles stopped quivering.

  Then he turned to her and swiftly reached out and with his right hand grasped her ear through her dark hair. At his touch, her hands fluttered briefly in her lap like wounded birds. He drew out his .500 with his left hand and pressed the gaping muzzle against the white flesh of her neck just below her jawbone.

  “This is how it starts,” he said.

  She still wouldn’t look at him, but her eyes welled with tears. She said, “Do whatever you have to do, Nate. Torture me like you tortured that man back there. I’m sure once you get started you’ll get me to say whatever you want me to say, but it won’t be true.”

  “How did you hook up with Cohen?” he asked.

  “You should believe me when I tell you he hooked up with me,” she said. “The man was relentless. Why would I throw my life away to go off in the middle of the mountains in Idaho and live like a hillbilly with a bunch of other men? There’s only one reason people do such things. It’s called love, Nate. Maybe you’ve read about it.”

  He gripped her ear with more pressure and said, “Haley, the man back there told me there was a young and beautiful operator on the team. He didn’t know her name except by code. I’m thinking she was the one that got to Merle a month ago. I didn’t ask him to identify you in person, but now I want you to tell me something. Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” she said. He could tell she was trying hard not to let her lips tremble and betray her emotions. “If he said it was me, he was lying. He couldn’t even see me in the Jeep. The headlights were on him, and we never made eye contact.”

  “Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”

  After a beat, she said, “Yes. And yes, it was two weeks ago.”

  He increased the pressure but didn’t twist.

  “My father is dying back in North Carolina,” she said. “I flew home to see him. Then I flew back.”

  Nate said softly, “That would have been the third week of September?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Right now I can’t think straight. Cohen took me to the airport on a Monday night….”

  “September seventeenth,” Nate said.

  “Okay. I got back Friday.”

  “The twenty-first.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Merle was gutted on September twentieth,” Nate said. “So you had time to find him, get close, and murder him. Or did you just set him up so one of the operators could get to him?”

  She blew out a quick, frustrated breath. More tears. “That whole week I was either at my parents’ house in Rocky Mount or at Nash General Hospital seeing my dad.”

  She laughed bitterly. “I assured my dying father I knew what I was doing out here. That I’d found a good man and I was safe. That gave him some comfort, and I didn’t know I was lying at the time.”

  She tried to turn her head toward Nate, but the grip on her ear prevented it.

  She said, “I wasn’t in Wyoming. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever even been here. If this is what it’s like, I never want to come back.”

  “I never said Merle died in Wyoming.”

  “Oscar told me. He knew because you contacted him. Think about it, Nate.”

  Nate said, “I can check on that story pretty easily.”

  “Do it,” she said, pleading. “Please do it. I flew from Idaho Falls to Salt Lake City and on to Raleigh, where my mom picked me up.”

  “What airline?”

  “Delta.”

  “What flight number?”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” he asked.

  “Why should I?” she asked. “I guess I didn’t realize you planned to torture me. That you didn’t trust me.”

  “Oscar told me you’d been there the whole time.”

  “Oscar … must have forgotten,” she said. “It was before everything started to happen. Or maybe,” she said, a lick of flame reentering her tone, “maybe Oscar was in on it, too. Maybe you should drive back to Idaho and break his fingers and pull his goddamn ears off if you can find what’s left of his head.”

  He released her ear and slipped his weapon back into the shoulder holster.

  “I had to be sure,” he said, and turned back and put the Jeep into gear.

  “Are you sure now?” she asked, then followed it with a sharp slap across his face. He flinched but didn’t retaliate.

  “I think so,” he said.

  Her words reminded him of his own father, and how he’d left him in Colorado Springs. Nate wondered where Gordo had taken his new family, his stepmother and two half sisters he barely knew. The thought flooded him with remorse for uprooting them, and he hoped someday he’d be able to make things right. Gordo had made him what he was, for better and worse. Nate no longer resented him for that, and he hoped to tell Gordo all was forgiven. Then Nate shook his head to clear the thought away. The task ahead of him left no room for sentimentality.

  THE LIGHTS of Dubois emerged through the snowfall ahead. It was a small, sleepy mountain town of barely a thousand people surrounded by closed guest ranches, hunting lodges, and working ranches, and rimmed by the Absaroka and Wind River Mountains.

  Nate slowed before he reached the town limits, looking for activity ahead, a roadblock or law enforcement presence. He saw nothing unusual.

  Finally, she said, “What else did you learn from that man back there in Jackson?”

  “Enough,” Nate said. “The playing field isn’t close to even, but at least it’s not as stacked against us as it was before. Now I know there are more operators where Nemecek set up his headquarters.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t lying?” she asked. “How do you know he wasn’t just telling you what you wanted to hear, or making something up you’d believe?”

  “I know the difference,” Nate said. “He lied at first. He lied through all of his fingers being broken back. He was a tough guy.”

  “What you did to him,” she said angrily, “it was awful. Savage.”

  “I let him live,” Nate said. “I called the hospital with his phone when I
could have let him bleed out or freeze. I could have finished him off. Now I’ve got a broken Special Forces operator out there who may someday come back at me.”

  “But what you did to him …”

  “Means to an end,” Nate said. “Torture works. It always has. That’s why they call it torture.”

  “You looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

  “I told you not to watch.”

  “I finally turned away,” she said, “but by then I’d seen too much. In ten minutes I went from kind of trying to like you to hating your fucking miserable guts.”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” she said, eyes flashing. “‘Means to an end’?”

  “Look,” he said, “that guy back there was a Peregrine. I went through the same training. He’s been waterboarded, sprayed in his open eyes with pepper spray, and dropped off in both jungles and deserts with no weapons or food. He wasn’t going to just tell me what I wanted to know unless he was convinced I wanted to kill him slowly. If there was a shadow of a doubt in his mind, he wouldn’t have talked.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then said, “But he talked.”

  “It took a while,” Nate said. “A lot longer than I’d hoped. Not until I started on his second hand, and even then he held back. For a while.”

  “It’s just so inhuman,” she said. “I always knew Gabriel had seen things and even done things overseas, but he never talked about them. Now I think I hate him, too.”

  “Don’t,” Nate said. “Cohen was like that poor son-of-a-bitch back there in the trucker cap. He was doing what he was hardwired to do and what he thought was right. It’s been going on for thousands of years, but you’ve had the wealth and comfort to go soft. Our whole country has. If it weren’t for men like those two, you’d see a lot more savagery, but you’d see it in the streets.”

  He said, “They protect you from knowing what’s out there, and there’s no appreciation for them. No gratitude.”

  “Don’t paint me like that,” she said defensively. “I know there’s violence in the world. I know there are people who want to kill us. I’m from a military family,” she said. “But I don’t have to enjoy what you did.”

  “And I hope you never do,” Nate said, “or your world would turn into mine.”

  They passed under a huge retro neon trout struggling on a fishing line that marked a closed sporting-goods store.

  “I’m looking for a pay phone,” Nate said.

  “They still have those?” she asked.

  He ignored her. “I need to call a buddy of mine. He’s in big trouble, but he doesn’t know it.”

  AS THEY backtracked through town and Nate located a public phone mounted on the side of a sleeping grocery store, she said, “For a while there, it seemed like something was happening between us, didn’t it?”

  He looked over, not sure how to respond.

  “I’d like to say it ended back there,” she said, looking away.

  “But it didn’t,” Nate said.

  “I’m not so sure now.”

  “Bad timing, I guess.”

  “It always is,” she said, and sighed.

  24

  JOE FELT A PUNCH OF PANIC in his gut when he saw the strange vehicle parked in front of his house through the cascading snow. It was a half hour from midnight: no one should be visiting. Worst-case scenarios corkscrewed through his mind, and he instinctively reached over and touched the shotgun—propped muzzle-down on the bench seat—to make sure it was there.

  His anxiety level had climbed each time he’d tried to call Marybeth’s cell phone as he roared down the mountain, only to get her voice-mail message. She was either on her phone or the phone was turned off. The message he’d left was: “I’m on the way.” While he’d dropped off Luke Brueggemann at the hotel, he’d speed-dialed the house phone, but all he got was a tinny recording announcing that the number he’d called wasn’t “in service at this time.”

  As he neared his home, he recognized the SUV as belonging to Deputy Mike Reed, and breathed a sigh of relief. Not until that moment did he realize how tightly he’d been gripping the wheel.

  Nevertheless, he carried the shotgun with him as he skipped up the snow-covered porch steps and threw open the front door.

  “Whoa, there, buckaroo,” Reed said when he looked up from a cup of coffee and saw the weapon. “Just us friendlies here.” He was seated on the couch in full uniform.

  Joe lowered the weapon and propped it in the corner of the mudroom before entering the living room. He could hear Marybeth talking in the kitchen on her cell phone—the reason he couldn’t reach her earlier. He shook snow off his parka and hung it on a peg.

  “It doesn’t look like it’s letting up much outside,” Reed said to Joe.

  “Nope.”

  “Road okay?”

  “Hasn’t seen a plow, if that’s what you’re asking,” Joe said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Reed said. “I don’t think the county road and bridge guys were ready for an October blizzard. No one was. The heavy snow knocked down some tree limbs south of town and took out the phone lines, too. They’re just now getting them fixed. The phone company didn’t have crews ready. You’d think they’d all just moved to Wyoming or something.”

  Joe nodded, relieved by the explanation for not being able to reach his wife.

  “So you found a dead deer in a cabin instead of a missing Indian woman?” Reed asked. When Joe looked up, Reed patted his handheld radio, from which he’d obviously been monitoring the transmissions.

  “Yup.”

  “What a waste of time,” Reed said, chuckling bitterly.

  “That’s how it goes these days,” Joe said in the same tone. Then: “Have you heard anything more about that situation in Jackson with the rollover?”

  “Not for a while,” Reed said. “I think we had a window there in the storm where we could hear them. But it’s closed now. I haven’t heard anything but static in that direction.”

  Joe nodded, then said, “Be right back.”

  He walked down the hallway and cracked open Lucy’s door. She was in bed. Her blond hair shimmered in the bar of light from the open door, and she turned over with her back to him and moaned in her sleep. Joe eased the door shut and went across the hall to April’s room. It was locked. He rapped on it with a knuckle.

  “What?” she asked, her voice shot through with outrage.

  “You okay?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason,” Joe said, turning back down the hall. Behind him, he could hear her voice trail off. Something about being grounded without a cell phone, practically a prisoner in her own home …

  Situation normal, he said to himself.

  He returned to the front room. Tube yawned and padded down the hall on his heels.

  Joe stopped inside the threshold and squinted at Reed.

  “Mike, why are you here?”

  Reed chuckled, lowered his coffee cup, and said, “Your wife called and told me what happened at the library when the lines went down. I thought I might just come up here and check on her and kind of hang out until you got home. Just to make sure this Bob White guy—or whoever he is—didn’t decide to come by for another visit.”

  “Thank you,” Joe said. He was touched.

  “Don’t mention it,” Reed said. “To be honest, it feels kind of nice to get out of the office for a while. McLanahan is going crazy. He’s lashing out at everyone like Hitler in his bunker during the last days of Berlin. I don’t mind getting away from that.”

  Marybeth peeked out at Joe from the kitchen. She held her cell phone to her ear and gestured with a “just a minute” finger in the air.

  “Did you locate the guy who spooked Marybeth?” Joe asked Reed.

  The deputy shook his head. “He was long gone, unfortunately. We’re circulating his description and the make of the vehicle she saw in the parking lot, though. If we get an identification I’ll le
t you know right away. This town isn’t big enough to hide in very long.”

  “I know,” Joe said. “But it’s a hell of a big county.”

  “Joe,” Reed said, “let us handle it if we find him. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to be there. I’ve seen that look in your eye before.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Do you have any idea who it was?” Reed asked, shooting Joe his sidelong cop stare.

  “Not for sure,” Joe said.

  “Marybeth told me it might be a guy named”—he glanced at his notebook—“John Nemecek. We ran the name and came up with absolutely nothing. No priors, no record of any kind. We don’t even know where he’s from.”

  “That sounds about right,” Joe said.

  Reed said, “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Joe thought about it for a few seconds and came clean. “Nate told me this John Nemecek might be after him. Apparently, they served together in Special Forces. I don’t know much more than that, but it’s possible Nemecek had something to do with all that’s been going on around here.”

  Reed didn’t blink, and continued to deadeye Joe. “So you’re all but admitting Romanowski offed the Kellys and Ron Connelly.”

  Joe said, “I don’t want to go there. But this Nemecek might be the key to everything.”

  “How long have you suspected this?”

  “From the start. But I’ve got no proof at all. I’ve never seen the guy, and I don’t know anything more about him than what Nate told me before he flew the coop. I’m not about to take my suspicions to McLanahan or Dulcie until I’ve got some kind of solid proof.”

  “Still, you should have said something before now,” Reed said. “We might have found this guy sooner.”

  Joe shook his head. “I don’t have any evidence, Mike. I’ve only got a suspicion. And I don’t want McLanahan to botch it by overplaying his hand.”