Dark Sky, page 19
part #21 of Joe Pickett Series
“What the hell happened?” Earl asked.
“Joe shot me,” Brad answered with alarm and disbelief. “He shot me.”
Joe ejected the casing and fitted another round into the chamber.
“Joe, come on,” Earl said plaintively. “You didn’t need to do that. I thought you were a bad shot, but you proved me wrong, I guess. But this Price asshole means nothing to you.”
Joe took several strides toward Price and kept the muzzle aimed toward the open door. He thought he had a minute at most before Brad came back or either Earl or Kirby arrived.
He grasped the back end of the spear and pulled hard. Joe could feel the spear tip release from the log. The tip of the spear was barbed for fish, so he didn’t pull it back through Price’s flesh.
“Come on,” Joe said to Price.
“Where?”
“Follow me.”
“Follow you where?”
“Out of here.”
“How?”
“Here,” Joe said, thrusting the .22 into Price’s hands. “Keep that aimed at the door and pull the trigger if anyone steps inside.”
* * *
—
Carrying the stump he’d used for a chair from where they’d huddled around the heating coil, Joe kicked the bed away from the wall and dropped it onto the floor in its place and mounted it. His back was to the open door and to Price, who asked him if the safety of the rifle was off.
“It’s off,” Joe said. “It’s cocked and ready to fire.”
Presuming the cartridge is good, Joe thought but didn’t say.
“I’ve never shot a gun before.”
“It’s a good time to learn.”
From outside, Joe heard Earl lament, “Goddamn it, Joe. You shot Brad in the jaw.”
“You ruined his beautiful smile,” Kirby chimed in with barely disguised glee. “The girls won’t have anything to do with him now.”
Kirby’s voice came from the left side of the cabin, not the front where Earl and Brad were. Good to know, Joe thought.
He braced himself on top of the stump and reached up and placed both palms against a sheet of plywood that rode down the ridge of the truss and appeared to be nailed directly to the top of the log wall. He grunted as he shoved and he felt it give. But it wasn’t yet enough to create an escape route.
“What are you doing?” Price asked.
“Aim toward the door,” Joe ordered.
He tried to calm himself. He took a deep breath and pushed up with all of his strength. As he did, he could feel a sharp pang in his thigh where the rifle bullet had damaged tissue and nerves the year before. The strain of the push made the stump rock beneath his feet and nearly topple over.
But the plywood sheet separated from the truss and the wall, leaving a two-foot gap. Joe felt icy cold on his face from the opening. He shoved up until his arms were stretched out and he opened the gap to three feet. The bottom edges of the plywood sheet bristled with exposed nail points.
Joe jumped down and pointed out the space to Price as he retrieved the rifle from him.
“Go,” Joe said.
“I don’t know if I can reach it.”
“I’ll help you,” Joe said. “Just be careful not to snag your clothes on those nails.”
Joe tossed the rifle aside on the bed frame and laced his fingers together and squatted. Price stepped into his cupped hands and Joe grunted again as he lifted the man up. Joe felt charged with unnatural strength, probably due to the adrenaline rushing through his body, he thought.
Price scrambled to get his head and shoulders out through the gap and he crawled through and dropped away. Joe heard him hit the ground hard on the other side of the wall.
He grabbed the rifle and tossed it through the space ahead of him so he wouldn’t have to try to climb with it. Then he jammed one of the chairs over the top of the stump to gain another eighteen inches and managed to step up to the seat of the chair. It was a rickety setup and he tried to maintain his cool as well as his balance.
While he struggled, he knew he had his back to the door and to anyone who might look inside. He had no defense. Joe anticipated the shock of being hit in the back at any moment.
He pulled himself up by grasping the top of the log wall and managed to find a foothold on the frame of a window. He was able to propel himself up and through the opening. He landed in a heap on his back in the snow with no more grace than Price had shown.
It took him a few seconds to get his wind back, and Joe sat up and grasped his bent knees with his arms.
“Are you okay?” Price asked. “Where do we go?”
“Don’t talk,” Joe said, aware that they could probably both be heard by the Thomases on the other side of the cabin.
As he said it, a dark form emerged from the corner of the cabin and separated from the structure. Joe could see him only because his body blocked the starlight on the snow in the immediate distance.
The unidentified man walked silently and with caution. He was no doubt hunting down the source of the noise from the back of the cabin.
Joe searched for the .22 and realized he’d landed on it. He was able to roll his butt cheek and extract the rifle just as the form turned toward them. He hoped the muzzle wasn’t jammed with soil from being tossed outside. Joe didn’t aim but generally pointed the muzzle of the rifle to center of mass.
The sharp crack of the shot illuminated Kirby’s surprised face for less than a second. He was just ten feet away.
Kirby said, “Ow,” and turned away. But he didn’t go down.
“Go,” Joe barked to Price. He knew he couldn’t see well enough to reload, and he didn’t know how badly Kirby was hit.
Joe rolled to his feet and joined Price, who was running wildly ahead of him through the snow toward a dark wall of timber.
“Where are we going?” Price asked over his shoulder.
“Just run,” Joe said, trying to keep up.
There was a heavy boom from behind them, followed by two more. Joe heard a rifle round smack into a tree trunk to his right. The impact sent a shower of snow cascading down all around him from branches that had been cradling it. Within a few steps, they were in black timber.
As he ran, sidling around trees and trying not to trip over downed logs or exposed roots, Joe recalled what his middle daughter, April, had said to him a year before when she came to visit him in his hospital bed:
You need to quit getting shot.
Tuesday
Slippery Son of a Bitch
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
—Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
NINETEEN
At 2:45 in the morning, Marybeth parked her van in front of Sheriff Scott Tibbs’s rental home on South Nebraska Street and killed the engine. She was furious.
Sheridan sat in the passenger seat, her face illuminated by the glow of the screen on her phone.
“Do you want to come in?” Marybeth asked.
“No, I’ll wait out here unless you need me. Maybe I can get some more intel on Steve-2.”
“I shouldn’t be long.”
Marybeth kept the van running so it would stay warm inside and left Sheridan in it with her device.
While driving there, she’d noted that the digital temperature gauge on the dashboard read twenty degrees. It was unseasonably cold out, and she could only guess how much colder it was in the mountains. She knew Joe had packed winter clothing and gear—he always did, no matter the month in Wyoming—but he couldn’t have fully prepared for this kind of weather. It wasn’t even winter yet.
Light snow fell and haloed around the streetlamp on the corner. It was the only light on for the entire block, although there was a dull glow behind the curtains in one of Tibbs’s windows.
She strode up the broken walkway and rang the doorbell. It chimed inside, but she couldn’t hear any activity. So she banged on the aluminum storm door with her gloved fist and it made an impressive-sounding racket.
“Sheriff Tibbs, I need to talk to you.”
A minute later, she saw the curtain shimmy from the room with the light on. Someone had peered out to see who was at the door. Then she heard shuffling inside.
Finally, a bolt was thrown from the inside and the door cracked open a few inches. Tibbs was short and stout and he sported a thick white mustache that obscured his upper lip. He had deep-set brown eyes and his uncombed hair stuck straight out to the side a few inches from over his left ear. He was bald, and she realized she’d never seen him without his comb-over. He was dressed in an oversized white T-shirt and red flannel pajama bottoms. His bare feet were nearly as wide as they were long on the hardwood floor. They looked like paddles.
Tibbs stepped out onto the threshold and eased the door partly shut behind him while he pushed at the storm door with a quizzical expression on his face.
“Mrs. Pickett,” he said in a slow western drawl. “What can I do you for?”
“You can answer your phone, for one thing.”
“What?”
“I’ve left half a dozen messages for you at your office today. You didn’t call me back. Then your receptionist gave me your county cell phone number, and it went straight to a recording that said you hadn’t set up your mailbox yet. I’ve sent you four texts and two emails. Since you didn’t respond to any of them, I didn’t have much choice but to come over here and roust you.”
Tibbs rubbed his face and then his eyes. “It’s pretty late,” he said.
“I know that.”
“It’s a good thing my wife is away,” he said. “She doesn’t like being awakened in the middle of the night.”
“I’m sorry,” Marybeth said in an acid tone, “I thought you were the sheriff.”
“I am the sheriff. Look, I can see that you’re upset about something, but I don’t neglect my duties. We’ve got staff on call during the night. I think Deputy Steck is on call tonight, in fact. You didn’t need to come straight to my house.”
Marybeth noted that he’d stepped farther out onto the porch and had eased the door almost but not quite fully closed behind him as he did so.
“That concrete has to be cold on your bare feet,” she said. She leaned to the side so she could get a peek inside his house through the thin opening. “What is it you don’t want me to see in there?”
Tibbs looked like he was thinking it over.
“This better be an emergency,” he growled as he stepped back and welcomed her in.
“It is.”
The house was warm inside and nicely appointed, she thought. There was a single lighted lamp near an overstuffed chair in front of the television set and a bar of light on the floor from an open door down the hallway. She hoped he’d turn on more lights because the setting was a little too intimate.
Tibbs retreated to the chair and settled heavily into it. He looked annoyed, but he gestured toward a hardback chair near the door for her to sit in. She didn’t.
“So, what’s the big emergency?” he asked.
“My husband, Joe, is guiding elk hunters in the mountains and we haven’t heard anything from him in thirty-six hours.”
Tibbs paused, then scoffed. “I’ve been hunting in the backcountry before, although it’s been a few years now. Thirty-six hours is nothing. I remember not talking to my wife for a week.”
“We’re not like that,” Marybeth said, her voice rising. “Believe me, coming here tonight was the last thing I wanted to do. But you don’t understand. Joe checks in every night he can when he’s gone. He has a satellite phone even if he has no cell signal. Under no circumstances would he forget two nights in a row. Something has happened up there,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of the Bighorns.
“There’s a lot more to this,” she said. “You know that Steve-2 Price and his ConFab people came here to go hunting?”
“Yeah, the governor gave me a heads-up on that. He said to treat this guy like a big VIP, so we closed the road to the airport to keep people away from him when he flew in. So Joe is the one guiding him, huh?”
“Yes. And another thing: Steve-2 constantly posts his movements and thoughts to all of his followers, and there’s millions of them. Other than a weird post last evening, he’s gone completely off-line as well.”
“What do you mean, a weird post?” Tibbs asked. “I’m not up on this social media hoopla.”
“My daughter noticed it,” Marybeth said. “The photo in it was taken the day before because there is no snow in the background. Why would Steve-2 post a day-old photo?”
“Beats me,” Tibbs said. Then: “Do they have plenty of food and clothing?”
“Yes.”
“So we’re not worried about them starving and dying of exposure up there.”
“No.”
“I’m not sure this is enough. Why don’t we wait until morning before we run around with our hair on fire?”
“It’s more than enough,” Marybeth said. “The reason I’m here is, I was told by your office that a search-and-rescue effort has to be approved and signed off personally by you before it can be done. Since you aren’t answering your phone, I had to come here and wake you up in person.”
Tibbs flinched.
That’s when a good-looking middle-aged woman wearing a short dark robe peered around the corner from the hallway.
“Scott, what’s going on?”
Marybeth recognized her as Ruthanne Hubbard, one of the longtime dispatchers for the sheriff’s department. She had a semipermanent stool at the Stockman’s Bar when she wasn’t working for the county. Ruthanne was attractive in a rough-edged way and she had at least two ex-husbands Marybeth knew about.
“Hello, Ruthanne,” Marybeth said.
“Hello, Marybeth.”
“Three of the books you checked out are long overdue.”
“I might have lost them.”
“Come in during business hours and we’ll get it sorted out.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but I’m having a private conversation with Sheriff Tibbs.”
“I don’t mind.” But she didn’t move.
“Go back to the bedroom,” Marybeth said to her with a sigh.
“Oh, right. I was just making sure everything was okay out here.”
“It isn’t, but we don’t need your help.”
“Is it concerning Joe?” Ruthanne asked.
“Yes.”
“Is he okay?”
“I hope so.”
“I do, too. I really like him. He’s always polite when I talk to him. Not every cop or officer is like that.”
“Ruthanne, please,” Tibbs said wearily.
“This is kind of part of my job,” Ruthanne said to him.
“Not tonight it isn’t,” he replied.
“Okay, I’ll see you later, Marybeth. It was good to see you. I hope Joe’s okay.”
“I do, too. Come in about those books.”
“I will.” Then to Tibbs: “See you soon.”
Tibbs sighed and looked at the floor. His face was beet red and his bare feet suddenly splotchy.
Marybeth said, “Caught. No wonder you weren’t picking up.”
Tibbs rubbed his face again. “Please don’t tell my wife when she gets back.”
“I’m not a gossip.”
“I don’t do this kind of thing. I’m not that kind of guy.”
“I’m not here to judge you,” Marybeth said, although what little regard she had for the new sheriff had just been hit by a torpedo.
“Thank you.”
Marybeth took a deep breath and shook her head. She wanted to grab a blunt object, maybe that ceramic zebra on the mantel, and clobber him.
Instead, she said, “Nate Romanowski and my daughter Sheridan are ready and willing to go try and find Joe and the hunters on their own, but it would be much better if you put together an official search-and-rescue effort. We might need aircraft, horses, and men on ATVs.”
Tibbs said, “I’m not comfortable with sending Romanowski up there. I’ve heard some pretty sketchy things about him.”
“It doesn’t look like I have a choice,” Marybeth said with heat.
Tibbs rubbed his jaw. “We can’t get anything going until morning, and then it’ll take a lot of time and money to get it underway.”
“I know that. But we’ve already lost too much time because you wouldn’t answer your phone.”
“I’ve got to figure out the protocol here,” Tibbs said. “I haven’t been in charge of one of these S-and-R operations here before. I know how we did it back in my old department, but there’s a lot more country around here.”
“Then move your ass,” Marybeth said. “Get up, get dressed, and get to your office and start making calls.”
“You don’t need to talk to me like that,” Tibbs said.
“It’s been thirty-six hours and it’s probably below zero up there,” she said. “It’s time to do your job.”
Tibbs grasped the arms of his chair and hauled himself to his feet. His face was dark with either anger or humiliation or both, she thought.
“I don’t know what I was thinking when I let them talk me into this job at the end of my career,” he said. “I was told this place was sleepy.”
“It isn’t,” Marybeth said.
* * *
—
Marybeth slid into the driver’s seat of her van and closed the door.
“I’m glad he was home and answered the door,” Sheridan said. “Did you get him to do something?”
“Yes, but he’s not very enthusiastic about it and it won’t be as quick as we want. Some of the delay is legitimate. He probably has no idea who to call to get the search-and-rescue team activated.”
