Three-Inch Teeth, page 26
“I’m going to find Nate.”
“Are you going to bring him back?” she asked.
“Not if the sheriff is here,” Joe said over his shoulder.
*
WHEN JOE ARRIVED at the former Cates compound, he found Dallas tied to a pole once used by his father and brothers to hang game animals. His hands were bound behind his back. Dallas’s broken body was glowing pink from the taillights of his pickup positioned fifteen feet away. A red-dot laser hovered above his right eyebrow. Cates was conscious but badly hurt, with bullet wounds in both of his shoulders and his upper left thigh.
Joe pulled his truck in front of the pickup and climbed out, deliberately leaving his shotgun inside the cab.
He sidled up to the side of the pickup’s topper, where an oblong slider was open, and he peered inside.
Nate sat on a metal tractor seat with his hands gripping the controls and his thumb poised over a red button on the right joystick. He looked straight ahead out the back of the pickup over the top of the telescopic scissor jib. Nate didn’t acknowledge that Joe was standing right next to him.
“Don’t do it, Nate,” Joe said.
“Ah, go ahead and do it,” Cates said, slurring his words. “Get it over with.”
Joe said, “Let me cut him down before he bleeds out. He’ll go back to prison for the rest of his life, unless they execute him.”
“Like that will ever happen,” Cates said with a grin. “When’s the last time Wyoming executed anyone?”
“You’re not helping your case,” Joe said with annoyance.
“I ain’t trying to,” Cates said.
Joe turned back to Nate. He said, “Not like this, Nate. Not in cold blood.”
“He killed Liv in cold blood,” Nate said in a tight whisper. “Then he used a tool with bear claws on it to mutilate her body.”
“I know,” Joe said. “It was brutal and she didn’t deserve it. He’s a monster, but you don’t have to be one.”
“Axel Soledad was with him,” Nate said.
Joe was shocked. “What?”
“Soledad didn’t die in Portland and he still wants revenge.”
Joe turned to Cates. “Is he kidding? Was Axel Soledad with you when you killed all these people?”
Cates nodded his head. “Right up until the end. Then he bugged out on me.”
“Where is he now?” Joe asked.
Cates made a bitter face. “In the wind, I guess. Plotting his next move. The guy is a stone-cold killer and I can’t say I miss him much.” Then: “Come on, get on with it. You people wiped my family off the planet and sold our property. Then you bring me out here to rub salt in the wound. So you might as well finish the job. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You make sure the people you consider white trash stay beneath you?”
Nate didn’t respond and Joe wasn’t sure what to say to either of them.
“There’s two bodies inside that house,” Cates said, chinning toward his old home. “The interlopers. Axel gets the credit for that, too. Plus that middle school girl in town.”
Nate turned his head to Joe. His face was still a white mask. “What if he gets out of prison, Joe? What if he escapes?”
“He won’t,” Joe said without conviction.
“We can’t take that chance,” Nate said. “Soledad is still out there and he’ll be coming for Geronimo, you, and me. And he’s probably got some of his true believers out there ready to deploy.”
Joe felt a chill wash through him.
Nate said, “I’ve got to find him before he comes back, and I don’t want to worry about Dallas here joining up with him again or getting in the way.”
“What about Kestrel?” Joe said. “You can’t just leave her.”
“She’s in good hands,” Nate said. “Better hands than mine. I can’t put her life in danger like I did with Liv.”
“No,” Joe said, shaking his head. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“I can blame myself for leaving my cell phone at the grocery store and not getting calls from you, Marybeth, or Liv tonight,” he said.
“I didn’t know about that,” Joe confessed.
“I made a mistake getting back on the grid,” Nate said. “I’m not you, Joe.”
“Nate …”
“Jesus,” Cates exclaimed. “Quit yapping like a couple of damned schoolgirls. Get on with it!”
Nate said, “I told you that bear was still here. I reached out to it and she answered and she guided me to your house. That is my world, Joe. Not this one.”
Cates hollered, “I’m going to die here waiting to die, for fuck’s sake!”
“Please, Nate,” Joe whispered.
Nate ignored Joe and focused on the controls. Joe turned his head away as the jaws fired out of the back of the truck and struck home with a terrifying crunch.
OCTOBER 29
The killing beast that cannot kill
Swells and swells in his fury till
You’d almost think it was despair.
—Edwin Muir, “The Combat,” Collected Poems, 1952
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Double Diamond Ranch
TWO DAYS LATER in the midafternoon, Joe followed a Game and Fish Department SUV driven by Brody Cress and Jennie Gordon down a county road toward the Double D Ranch. The SUV was speeding and its wigwag lights were flashing red and blue. Joe kept his distance behind them in his pickup to avoid the dust cloud trailing the vehicle.
Clay Hutmacher had called thirty minutes before and reported that the grizzly bear was back on his ranch. He’d found it feeding on a freshly killed Angus heifer in a pasture just beyond the corrals. Hutmacher said he’d unloaded his .300 Winchester Magnum rifle at the grizzly and he was pretty sure he’d hit it at least once before it ran away.
Clay sounded both ecstatic and half mad as he explained what had just happened.
The day before, Bill Brodbeck had died in the hospital from his wounds. Somehow, Judge Hewitt was still hanging in there.
*
THEY FOUND HUTMACHER in the pasture next to the carcass of the disemboweled heifer. The rancher pointed to a rock outcropping halfway up a hill to the east.
“That’s where he went,” Hutmacher said, pointing with the muzzle of his rifle. “Up in those rocks. I’ve been glassing it since I called and I haven’t seen him come out.”
Cress raised a pair of binoculars and stood next to the rancher.
“I don’t see him,” he said.
“That don’t mean he’s not there,” Hutmacher responded.
Joe found Gordon looking not at the outcropping but at him. She had concern on her face.
“Joe, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“I need you to be fully here with us when we go after that bear.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“You don’t look like it,” she said.
He didn’t respond.
*
JOE HAD BEEN in a kind of fugue state the thirty-six hours since he’d found Nate and Dallas Cates on the compound once owned by the Cates family. The scene he’d happened on still chilled him, and the peripheral events surrounding it puzzled him because they were filled with unknowns that may or may not be connected.
Why had it taken Jackson Bishop over an hour to show up at his home that night? According to Sheridan and Marybeth, Bishop had displayed no sense of urgency at the scene, and he’d arrived without backup. He claimed he couldn’t rouse the deputies quickly enough in time to respond, but that excuse came across as baffling to Joe. Wouldn’t eager, young Fearless Frank Carroll have jumped on the chance to confront the bad guys who had earlier eluded him? It didn’t jibe, and Joe had disturbing doubts about the man who would inevitably become the local sheriff.
Axel Soledad’s involvement had come as a shock as well. Joe was all but certain the man had bled out in an alley in Portland, the result of Geronimo’s and Joe’s fusillade of shotgun blasts, but it appeared he’d somehow survived and joined up with Dallas Cates. And now he was in the wind.
Marybeth had asked her board for a leave of absence while Kestrel settled into their lives. The little girl still wasn’t sure what had happened to her parents, and she looked expectantly at the outside door whenever it opened and she frequently asked for her mother. Marybeth put on a brave and cheerful face and she slipped easily back into the role of caretaker for small girls that she’d mastered dozens of years before.
Nate was gone, his house empty and his Jeep missing. He’d assured Joe he’d be in touch once he “worked things out.” But there had been no word from him and his cell phone had been apparently discarded.
The fact that Joe’s estranged birth mother, Katherine Pickett/Cotton, was identified as the murder victim left on the side of his county road was baffling. Had she literally followed Sheridan back to Wyoming? Why? Was her purpose to try to reconcile? The thought of that both confused and chilled him.
The disappearance of Axel Soledad and the discovery of his mother’s body in around the same location was more than a coincidence.
The story, whatever it was, was bound to be continued.
*
THEY FOUND THE dead grizzly bear wedged between two large boulders in the center of the outcropping. A weathered telemetry collar was around its neck, the battery long ago depleted. The grizzly was splayed out as if sleeping, its rear paw pads facing up and legs stretched out.
“It’s over,” Cress said as he shouldered his rifle. “It sure looks like the bear we saw in the river.”
“She never left the area,” Gordon said with quiet awe. “We chased her all over the state and she never really left.”
Joe arched his eyebrows. “She?”
“It’s a female,” Gordon said. “That kind of surprises me.”
“Are we sure it’s the same bear?” Joe asked.
“We’ll do some forensic testing, but I’d guess the odds to be ninety-nine-point-nine percent it’s the same bear that attacked Clay Junior and Brodbeck.
“See here,” Gordon said, bending back a tuft of thick long hair on the far left thigh of the animal to reveal a scabbed-over bullet wound. “One of us hit her like we thought. Maybe that’s why she didn’t go very far. She must have hunkered down in the woods until she felt good enough to move again.”
“That poor old girl got blamed for a lot of bad acts,” Cress said. “I kind of feel sorry for her. Almost.”
“Now for the moment of truth,” Gordon said as she bent down next to the bear’s massive head.
Joe was confused for a moment until he saw Gordon pull on a pair of nitrile gloves and reach down to the grizzly’s snout and peel back the thick upper lip.
There, on the pink underside of her lip, he could clearly see the numbers 4-1-3 stenciled in dark ink.
“Oh, no,” Gordon sighed. “Oh, no.”
“Tisiphone,” Joe said. “The Mama Bears were right.”
Gordon looked up at Joe and implored him with her eyes to never speak of this again. She did the same to Cress, who nodded his agreement.
“Let me get my knife,” Cress said. “We need to get rid of that tattoo.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the people who provided help, expertise, and information for this novel.
Dan J. Thompson, PhD, the large carnivore section supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, provided invaluable in-person experience and research about grizzly bears in and around Wyoming.
Special kudos to my first readers, Laurie Box, Molly Box, Becky Reif, and Roxanne Woods.
A tip of the hat to Molly Box and Prairie Sage Creative for cjbox.net, merchandise design, and social media assistance.
Congratulations to Doug Wick, Lucy Fisher, John Dowdle, Drew Dowdle, Michael Dorman, and Julianna Guill for bringing Joe and Marybeth to life on television.
It’s a sincere pleasure to work with the professionals at Putnam, including the legendary Neil Nyren, Mark Tavani, Daphne Durham, Ivan Held, Alexis Welby, Ashley McClay, and Katie Grinch.
And thanks once again to our agent and friend, Ann Rittenberg.
About the Author
C.J. BOX is the author of over 30 novels including the Joe Pickett series. He has won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe and Barry Awards, as well as numerous other US and international awards for literature. Two television series based on his novels are in production (Big Sky on ABC and Disney+ and Joe Pickett on Paramount+). He is an Executive Producer for both series. He and his wife Laurie live on their ranch in Wyoming.
Follow C.J. Box at cjbox.net
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C.J. Box, Three-Inch Teeth
