Blue Heaven Part 2

"Target shooting?"

"Yeah, we try to get out every couple of months to stay sharp. Anyway, we want to make sure those poor kids know we meant no harm."

Annie cracked an eye to look at Swann. Don't do it, she wanted to shout.

"Scared 'em pretty good, eh?" Swann said.

"I'm afraid so. Anyway, we want to find them and let 'em know everything's okay."

"Is everything okay?" Swann asked.

Singer didn't respond.

"It will be when we find those kids," another man said with a trace of a Mexican accent. Annie guessed it was the Dark Man with the mustache.

"So you haven't seen them?" Singer asked again.

Swann hesitated.

Annie closed her eyes again and tried to prepare to die. She didn't hear the bulk of the conversation that followed because it was drowned out by the roar of blood in her ears, although she did hear Swann say someone had come up behind him and was waiting for him to go.

"Yes," Singer had said, "you had better go home now."

She couldn't believe her luck-their luck-when she realized the truck was moving again.

"I think you kids should stay down," Swann said.

Annie asked, "Where are you taking us?"

"My place is just up the road, and I need to make a call."

"Why aren't you taking us home?"

"Because I don't want to run into those boys again," Swann said. "I know them from back on the force, and that story they just told me doesn't make a lot of sense."

"That's because we're telling you the truth," Annie said, feeling the tears well up in her eyes.

"Maybe," Swann said. "Keep your heads down."

Friday, 4:40 P.M.

JESS RAWLINS was doing groundwork with his new horse Chile in the round pen near the corral when a new-model Lexus emerged from the timber on the southern hill and drove down the access road toward his ranch house. It caught him by surprise because he was concentrating so fully on his horse, a fourteen-hand three-year-old red dun. He had fallen into a kind of hyperalert trance, mesmerized by the rhythmic sound and cadence of her hoofbeats. Jess had forgotten how much he loved the sound of hoofbeats, the solid soft pounding rhythm of them, how he could feel them through the ground as the eleven-hundred-pound animal trotted, how the sound lulled him, took him back. A few moments before, when he was lunging her to the right, he'd picked out the sound of a series of sharp rapid-fire percussions along with the thump of her hoofbeats, a snapping sound that alarmed him for a moment before he realized they were from far up the valley and had nothing to do with the gait of his horse. He had stopped her suddenly, and she had turned nicely into an abrupt stop, facing him like she was supposed to, looking at him with both eyes, breathing hard, licking her lips with compliance. He listened and heard no more pops in the distance.

If the wooded valley he lived in was indeed a saddle slope, his house and outbuildings were located just under the pommel. From there, he could see anyone coming down from the state highway toward his ranch. At dusk, he often watched mule deer graze their way to the valley floor to drink at the stream.

He kissed the air and sidestepped to the right, and Chile responded instantly with the correct lead, trotting in a circle to the left on the end of the lead rope Jess held loosely in his left hand. In his right was a stiff coil of rope used to signal the mare, keep the invisible pressure on her to keep moving in a nice smooth stride. Sometimes, to get her attention, he whapped the rope against the leg of his Wranglers. Mostly, though, all he had to do was raise it to get her moving. He had never hit her with it. As Chile circled, Jess stayed on her left flank. Jess was falling madly in love with this horse, a short, stout, heavily muscled little mare with a kind eye and two white socks. People who watched horse races and thought horses should be aquiline and sleek would find Chile ugly. Jess didn't. She was a cla.s.sic foundation quarter horse, a cow horse. In his peripheral vision, he noted the slow progress of the car.

The Lexus crawled down the access road, the afternoon sun gleaming off the windshield and the chrome grille, the car slowing even more as it neared a cow and calf in the meadow, as if the driver expected the cattle to bolt across the road. There was only one way into the Rawlins Ranch from the state highway, and the road ended at the ranch house.

Jess Rawlins was tall, stiff, all sharp angles: bony elbows and knees, prominent hawklike nose, p.r.o.nounced cheekbones. The only thing soft about him, his wife Karen told him once, were his eyes and his heart, but not in a good way.

When the Lexus parked between his house and the barn and the driver's side door opened, Jess shot his first glance over while Chile circled. The man who climbed out was slim, well built, with thick blond hair and a bristly mustache. He was wearing khakis and a purple polo shirt that draped well on his frame. He looked like a golfer, Jess thought. No, worse. A Realtor.

Jess brought the coil of rope down sharply, and Chile stopped. Like all horses, it didn't take much to convince her to stop working. Jess liked the way she looked at him, though, waiting for the next command. Sometimes, horses could stare with contempt. Chile, though, respected him. He respected her back. He thought, We are going to have a long relationship, Chile and me.

Jess waited for the man to approach the round pen. Then he heard it again, two distinct pops from far up the valley. Gunshots. Not an unusual sound at all in North Idaho, where everyone had guns.

The man-his name was Brian Ballard, Jess recognized him from his photo in the real estate pages of the newspaper-appeared not to hear the gunshots. Instead, he stopped on the other side of the railing and put a ta.s.seled loafer on the lower rail and draped his arms over the top rail. As he did it, Jess's eyes slid from Brian Ballard to the Lexus and saw the profile of the pa.s.senger inside for the first time. It was her, all right.

"How's it going, Mr. Rawlins?" Ballard asked with false good cheer. "I see you're training a horse there."

"Groundwork," Jess said. "I have to hand it to the new breed of horse trainers out there who stress groundwork above all. They know their stuff, and they're right." He looked over at Brian Ballard: "What do you want?"

Ballard smiled and his eyebrows arched and his mouth pursed. He was uncomfortable, despite the smile. "I don't know much about horses. I'm allergic to them."

"Too bad."

"I'm Brian Ballard, but I guess you know that."

"I do."

"I'm pleased to meet you, finally," Ballard said, nodding toward Jess. "This is a pretty place, all right."

Jess didn't move.

"I saw Herbert Cooper in town this morning. He said you had to lay him off at the ranch."

Herbert Cooper had worked for Jess for thirteen years. The day before, Jess had to tell his longtime foreman that he couldn't pay his wages anymore, that there was not enough income for both bank loan payments and an employee. It was one of the hardest things Jess had ever had to do, and he hadn't slept well. Plus, it was calving season, and he was now on his own.

Jess noticed Ballard looking at Chile. Jess could tell what he was thinking, and it made him angry.

"This horse came to me as payment for leasing out a quarter section for grazing," Jess said, wishing he hadn't said it. There was no need to justify himself, certainly not to this man.

"Oh."

Jess nodded toward the Lexus. "I see Karen in there. She put you up to this?"

Ballard looked back as if confirming it was Karen in his car, even though he knew it was. It took a moment for Ballard to turn back to Jess.

"Let's leave her out of this, if you don't mind. There's no reason you and I can't be gentlemen about this."

Jess said, "There are plenty of reasons. So why don't you get back in your car and get the h.e.l.l off of my ranch?"

"That's not necessary," Ballard said, his eyes almost pleading. Jess felt sorry for him for a moment. Then it pa.s.sed.

"You can get out the same way you came in," Jess said. "Remember to close the gate."

"Look," Ballard said, showing Jess the palms of his hands. "Everybody knows the situation out here. It's a struggle, a real hard struggle. You had to let Herbert go, and everybody else is"-he searched for the right word and came up with a wrong one-"gone. I've been sending you offers for months now, and you know my reputation. I'm a fair man, and in this case more than generous. I was hoping we could have a discussion man-to-man, feelings aside."

Jess paused, felt his chest tighten. He looked down at his hand and saw that his fingers were white from gripping the lunging rope so tightly that it hurt.

"To have a man-to-man discussion," Jess said, "you need two men. So we're out of luck in your department. I've asked you twice to leave. If I have to say it a third time, it'll be from behind the sights of my Winchester."

Ballard's mouth opened as if to speak, but nothing came out. Jess glared at him, heat rising. Then he took a step forward in order to tie Chile up to the rail. When he moved, Ballard flinched and took his foot off the rail.

"You don't need to threaten me. I can buy this place from you or I can wait and buy it from the bank."

"Git," Jess said.

Brian Ballard backed up, then turned. He said over his shoulder, "You're making a mistake, Jess. I'll be more than fair, I told you that."

Jess tied up Chile and watched Ballard walk toward his Lexus. He saw Karen turn in her seat toward Ballard as he opened the door. Jess could tell what she was saying by the tilt of her head. He heard Ballard say, "No. You tell him if that's what you want."

Ballard swung into the vehicle and made a U-turn in the gravel, and Jess watched the car drive away for a while up the hill on the access road. It took him a few minutes before his hands stopped trembling.

"We need to get a saddle on you," he told Chile, running his hand along her stout neck.

JESS WATCHED them go over the back of the horse. The afterimage of Karen's profile seemed to hang in the dust whorls left by the tires.

So that was Brian Ballard, the man she left him for. The man she married after him.

He had not fought back when she announced she was leaving, said she had outgrown him and that he not only hadn't kept up but had regressed. Said that just being on the ranch with him made her claustrophobic. That he had to get past what had happened to their son. That he was an anachronism. How could he fight that?

Karen got their savings and the feed store in town, which she promptly sold. And she got the Lincoln and his horse. Sold them, too.

Jess kept the ranch.

THE TREK up the hill and through the timber to the mailbox seemed longer than it ever had, he thought, and his legs felt heavier. For years, Jess never got the mail. Herbert or Margie did it, or another ranch hand, or his wife Karen did it. She used to love to get the mail. Later, he found out why.

To make matters worse, it seemed that more often than not he ran into Fiona Pritzle, the woman who had the rural mail route, at his mailbox. She was a vicious gossip, he thought, the woman who had spread the word when his wife left, and for whom. Fiona would feign concern for his health and well-being, and try to pump him for news and information. Had he heard from his ex-wife? Did he know she had moved back to town? Was it true the ranch was in trouble? So when he heard a vehicle coming up the road, he stopped in the wet foliage. There had been a time when there was little traffic on the road, and Jess knew everyone on it.

In fact, there was a time, in Pend Oreille County, when everybody knew Jess Rawlins and Jess knew everyone else. That was when the lumber mills were running and the silver mines were hiring. It was rough, isolated, fiercely rugged country then, and the people who lived there were subjugated by the mountains, the weather, the deep forests, the isolation, and the unenlightened corporations who came there to extract everything they could, including the goodwill and civility of their employees. The profligate, rough-and-tumble wildness of the environment and atmosphere beat people down. The exception were people like Jess, families like the Rawlinses, who had come from poor stock themselves but managed to build an enterprise-the Rawlins Ranch- rather than simply remove commodities to be shipped elsewhere. They built their own legacy, and by doing it moved up in status and respectability. Unlike the logging company managers and mining executives who were sent to the Idaho panhandle from places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia to do their time and to take as much as they could as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible so they could put in for a transfer to a more hospitable post, the Rawlinses built a bulwark and established a heritage that was shared and celebrated.

Jess grew up feeling like a local hero. His grandfather and father had bequeathed the mantle of exceptionalism; that he was of the people, not better than them, but he had a special something because his name was Rawlins. The exceptionalism was a result of hard work, honest but tough business dealings, and high moral character.

The Rawlins Ranch was all the more admirable because North Idaho was not optimal cattle country. There were too many trees, not enough prairie and pasture. It rained too much. Unlike the vast ranches to the south or in bordering states Montana, Wyoming, and eastern Oregon, the Rawlins Ranch had to be carved out of the forest and managed carefully like a temperamental machine. They couldn't just let cattle go to forage for themselves for months, like ranchers could do in more wide-open country. If they did, the cattle got lost in the timber. So they moved their herds from park to park, plateau to plateau, keeping careful count. The rain and lushness of the terrain invited hoof-rot and disease born of moisture, so the cattle needed to be inspected and handled more than usual. Jess's grandfather had established the procedure for counting, moving, and inspecting his cattle. From Washington State he'd bought seed bulls who were bred for wet ground and heavy snow. The quality of Rawlins beef became widely praised, and the ranch prospered due to its management. The high price of beef helped, too.

Jess, like his father and grandfather, felt proprietary toward the valley, the community, and the ranch. After serving in the Army, he had no doubt, ever, that he would return. Which he did.

Jess often wondered if he had made the right choice, knowing what he knew now. He also wondered if he'd been the catalyst for things to come, for the decline. Had the spark of exceptionalism died in him? He'd been unable to pa.s.s along the sense of eminence he had always felt.

Maybe, he thought, it had just played out.

FIONA PRITZLE, behind the wheel of her little yellow Datsun pickup, had a stern, pinched look on her face until she saw him. The change in her demeanor was instantaneous, though for Jess her self-focused scowl remained as an afterimage, even when she stopped at his mailbox and climbed out and grinned at him. How did she know when he would be there, he wondered? He didn't even know from day to day. Fiona had a wide, pockmarked face obscured by heavy makeup. A cloud of perfume was released into the air when she climbed out, and she leaned over the top of the hood, fanning his mail across it as if laying down a winning hand of cards, smiling at him with nice teeth, her best feature. He had, of course, noticed that in the last few months she had been dressing better, putting her hair up, adding lipstick to her mouth. Apparently, she now felt the need not just to deliver his mail but to oversee it.

"Catalogs," she said, "three of 'em today. Two for women's clothing, so you're still on their list even though they don't know ..."

He looked at her grimly.

"And a property tax notice, again," she said in her little-girl voice, eyeing him suspiciously. "I know I've delivered a couple of these to you already."

He nodded, nothing more.

"Jess, I saw Herbert in town."

"He moved to town," Jess said.

"He waved, but he didn't stop. Is something wrong?"

d.a.m.n, he thought. But he repeated, "Just moved to town."

She looked at him suspiciously, then gathered up his mail in a stack and handed it to him.

"This road is getting busy," she said. "I almost rear-ended a vehicle back there when I came around the corner."

He raised his eyebrows, hoping his lack of response would signal her to go away. She had designs on him, he knew. He was over women, though.

"A Cadillac Escalade with three men in it. They were barely crawling down the road, looking into the trees."

He shrugged.

"Brand-new Idaho plates. Probably more transplants."

"There's a lot of them moving up here," he said.

"Most of them are retired cops from L.A.," she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially. "I've heard that there's more than two hundred of them overall, and about a dozen on my route alone."

"How do you know that?"

She puffed up. "I put the pension checks in their mailboxes, and police newsletters, things like that. Some of them meet me every day, like you. A couple of real nice guys, real personable. But some of them are just like hermits or something. Like they don't want to mix with somebody like me. If it wasn't for their mail, I don't know if they'd ever come out of their houses. They call North Idaho 'Blue Heaven' at the LAPD. Did you know that?"

Herbert had told him that, but he didn't want to bring it up. Jess didn't object to the idea of ex-policemen moving in. In fact, if he had to choose the kind of people to move into the valley-not that he had a choice-he would have opted for retired police officers. It seemed to him that ex-cops were similar to the original settlers, men like his grandfather. They had been workingmen in crowded cities with blue-collar backgrounds. After years of dealing with the dark underbelly of crowded conditions and the worst of civilization, they'd opted to move to fresh, green country where they could be left alone. Better ex-cops than actors or dot-com heirs, he thought. The kind who came in, took over, and transformed the place. There were some of them, for sure. Too many for Jess's taste.

"Hundreds," she said. "Buying up everything. But it sort of makes you feel safer, doesn't it?"

Jess said nothing. She went on, "But I don't like the way some of them keep to themselves, you know? Like they think they're better than everybody else. Why did they move here if they just wanted to keep to themselves? They could have moved anywhere for that. You'd think they'd want to be friendlier, you know, since a lot of them are divorced and all. I mean: Here I am!" She did a clumsy little twirl that made Jess cringe. "One of them might steal me away from you, Jess Rawlins, if they pulled their heads out of their b.u.t.ts long enough to, you know, look around...."

Enough, he thought. Seeing Karen had filled him with darkness. He didn't want to talk with Fiona Pritzle, but he didn't want to be rude, either.

"I better get back," he said, gesturing toward his mail as if he couldn't wait to read through it.

"You wouldn't believe how many retirement checks and LAPD newsletters I deliver these days," she said, repeating herself. "They're all up and down this road."

"Then you better get after it," he said cheerfully.

She reacted as if he'd slapped her. "Just being neighborly," she huffed. "I guess I caught you in one of your moods, Jess."

He didn't like it when she used his first name, or that she studied his mail before she gave it to him. She was too familiar with him, he thought. She should be more professional.