Free Fire Part 1

FREE FIRE.

by C. J. Box.

To Becky, who finally saw her bear . . . and Laurie, always

Part one

YELLOWSTONE ACT, 1872.

AN ACT TO SET APART A CERTAIN TRACT OF.

LAND LYING NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE.

YELLOWSTONE RIVER AS A PUBLIC PARK.

Approved March 1, 1872 (17 Stat. 32) Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress a.s.sembled, That the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River . . . is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a publicpark or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people; and all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same, or any part thereof, except as hereinafter provided,shall be considered trespa.s.sers and removed therefrom. (U.S.C., t.i.tle 16, sec. 21.)

1.

Bechler River Ranger Station Yellowstone National Park July 21

A half-hour after clay mccann walked into the backwoods ranger station and turned over his still-warm weapons, after he'd announced to the startled seasonal ranger behind the desk that he'd just slaughtered four campers near Robinson Lake, the nervous ranger said, "Law enforcement will be here any minute. Do you want to call a lawyer?"

McCann looked up from where he was sitting on a rough-hewnbench. The seasonal ranger saw a big man, a soft man with a sunburn already blooming on his freckled cheeks from just that morning, wearing ill-fitting, brand-new outdoor clothes that still bore folds from the packaging, his blood-flecked hands curled in his lap like he wanted nothing to do with them.

McCann said, "You don't understand. I am am a lawyer." a lawyer."

Then he smiled, as if sharing a joke.

2.

Saddlestring, Wyoming October 5

Joe pickett was fixing a barbed-wire fence on a boulder-strewn hillside on the southwest corner of the LongbrakeRanch when the white jet cleared the mountaintop and halved the cloudless pale blue sky. He winced as the roar of the engines washed over him and seemed to suck out all sound and complexity from the cold mid-morning, leaving a vacuum in the pummeled silence. Maxine, Joe's old Labrador, looked at the sky from her pool of shade next to the pickup.

Bud Longbrake Jr. hated silence and filled it immediately. "d.a.m.n! I wonder where that plane is headed? It sure is flying low." Then he began to sing, poorly, a Bruce c.o.c.kburn song from the eighties:

If I had a rocket launcher . . .

I would not hesitate The airport, Joe thought but didn't say, ignoring Bud Jr., the plane is headed for the airport the plane is headed for the airport. He pulled the strand of wire tight against the post to pound in a staple with the hammer end of his fencing tool.

"Bet he's headed for the airport," Bud Jr. said, abruptly stopping his song in mid-lyric. "What kind of plane was it, anyway?It wasn't a commercial plane, that's for sure. I didn't see anything painted on the side. Man, it sure came out of nowhere."

Joe set the staple, tightened the wire, pounded it in with three hard blows. He tested the tightness of the wire by strummingit with his gloved fingers.

"It sings better than you," Joe said, and bent down to the middlestrand, waiting for Bud Jr. to unhook the tightener and move it down as well. After a few moments of waiting, Joe looked up to see that Bud Jr. was still watching the vapor trail of the jet. Bud Jr. looked at his wrist.w.a.tch. "Isn't it about time for a coffee break?"

"We just got here," Joe said. They'd driven two hours across the Longbrake Ranch on a two-track to resume fixing the fence where they'd left it the evening before, when they knocked off early because Bud Jr. complained of "excruciatingback spasms." Bud Jr. had spent dinner lobbying his father for a Jacuzzi.

Joe stood up straight but didn't look at his companion. There was nothing about Bud Jr. he needed to see, nothing he wasn't familiar with after spending three weeks working with him on the ranch. Bud Jr. was thin, tall, stylishly stubble-faced, with sallow blue eyes and a beaded curtain of black hair that fell down over them. Prior to returning to the ranch as a condition of his parole for selling crystal methamphetamine to fellow street performers in Missoula, he'd been a nine-year student at the University of Montana, majoring in just about every one of the liberal arts but finding none of them as satisfying as pantomimeon Higgins Street for spare change. When he showed up back at the Longbrake Ranch where he was raised, Bud Sr. had taken Joe aside and asked Joe to "show my son what it means to work hard. That's something he never picked up. And don't call him Shamazz, that's a name he made up. We need to break him of that. His real name is Bud, just like mine."

So instead of looking at Bud Jr., Joe surveyed the expanse of ranchland laid out below the hill. Since he'd been fired from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department four months before and lost their state-owned home and headquarters, Joe Pickett was now the foreman of his father-in-law's ranch-fifteen thousand acres of high gra.s.sy desert, wooded Bighorn Mountain foothills, and Twelve Sleep River valley. Although housing and meals were part of his compensation-his family lived in a 110-year-oldlog home near the ranch house-he would clear no more than $20,000 for the year, which made his old state salary look good in retrospect. His mother-in-law, Missy Vankueren-Longbrake,came with the deal.

It was the first October in sixteen years Joe was not in the field during hunting season, on horseback or in his green Game and Fish pickup, among the hunting camps and hunters within the fifteen hundred-square-mile district he had patrolled. Joe was weeks away from his fortieth birthday. His oldest daughter, Sheridan, was in her first year of high school and talking about college. His wife's business management firm was thriving, and she outearned him four to one. He had traded his weapons for fencing tools, his red uniform shirt for a Carhartt barn coat, his badge for a shovel, his pickup for a '99 Ford flatbed with LONGBRAKERANCHES painted on the door, his hard-earned authority and reputation for three weeks of overseeing a twenty-seven-year-old meth dealer who wanted to be known as Shamazz.

All because of a man named Randy Pope, the director of the Game and Fish Department, who had schemed for a year lookingfor a reason to fire him. Which Joe had provided.

When asked by Marybeth two nights ago how he felt, Joe had said he was perfectly happy.

"Which means," she responded, "that you're perfectly miserable."

Joe refused to concede that, wishing she didn't know him better than he knew himself.

But no one could ever say he didn't work hard.

"Unhook that stretcher and move it down a strand," Joe told Bud Jr.

Bud Jr. winced but did it. "My back . . ." he said.

The wire tightened up as Bud cranked on the stretcher, and Joe stapled it tight.

They were eating their lunches out of paper sacks beneatha stand of yellow-leaved aspen when they saw the SUV coming. Joe's Ford ranch pickup was parked to the side of the aspens with the doors open so they could hear the radio. Paul Harvey News, the only program they could get clearly so far from town. Bud hated Paul Harvey nearly as much as silence, and had spent days vainly fiddling with the radio to get another station and cursing the fact that static-filled Rush Limbaugh was the only other choice.

"Who is that?" Bud Jr. asked, gesturing with his chin toward the SUV.

Joe didn't recognize the vehicle-it was at least two miles away-and he chewed his sandwich as the SUV crawled up the two-track that coursed through the gray-green patina of sagebrush.

"Think it's the law?" Bud asked, as the truck got close enough so they could see several long antennas bristling from the roof. It was a new-model GMC, a Yukon or a Suburban.

"You have something to be scared of?" Joe asked.

"Of course not," Bud said, but he looked jumpy. Bud was sittingon a downed log and he turned and looked behind him into the trees, as if planning an escape route. Joe thought how many times in the past his approach had likely caused the same kind of mild panic in hunters, fishermen, campers.

Joe asked, "Okay, what did you do now now?"

"Nothing," Bud Jr. said, but Joe had enough experience talkingwith guilty men to know something was up. The way they wouldn't hold his gaze, the way they found something to do with their hands that wasn't necessary, like Bud Jr., who was tearing off pieces of his bread crust and rolling them into little b.a.l.l.s.

"She swore she was eighteen," Bud said, almost as an aside, "and she sure as h.e.l.l looked it. s.h.i.t, she was in the Stockman's having c.o.c.ktails, so I figured they must have carded her, right?"

Joe snorted and said nothing. It was interesting to him how an old-line, hard-a.s.sed three-generation rancher like Bud Longbrakecould have raised a son so unlike him. Bud blamed his first wife for coddling Bud Jr., and complained in private to Joe that Missy, Bud's second wife and Marybeth's mother, was now doing the same thing. "Who the f.u.c.k cares if he's creative creative," Bud had said, spitting out the word as if it were a bug that had crawled into his mouth. "He's as worthless as t.i.ts on a bull."

In his peripheral vision, Joe watched as Bud Jr. stood up from his log as the SUV churned up the hill. He was ready to run.

It was then that Joe noticed the GMC had official State of Wyoming plates. Two men inside, the driver and another wearinga tie and a suit coat.

The GMC parked next to Joe's Ford and the pa.s.senger door opened.

"Is one of you Joe Pickett?" asked the man in the tie. He looked vaguely familiar to Joe, somebody he might have seen in the newspaper. He was slightly built and had a once-eager face that now said, "I'm harried." The man pulled a heavy jacket over his blazer and zipped it up against the cold breeze.

"He is," Bud Jr. said quickly, pointing to Joe as if naming the defendant in court.

"I'm Chuck Ward, chief of staff for Governor Rulon," the man said, looking Joe over as if he were disappointed with what he saw but trying to hide it. "The governor would like to meet with you as soon as possible."

Joe stood and wiped his palms on his Wranglers so he could shake hands with Ward.

Joe said, "The governor is in town?"

"We came up in the state plane."

"That was the jet we saw, Joe. Cool, the governor," Bud Jr. said, obviously relieved that the GMC hadn't come for him him. "I've been reading about him in the paper. He's a wild man, crazy as a tick. He challenged some senator to a drinking contestto settle an argument, and he installed a shooting range behindthe governor's mansion. That's my kind of governor, man," he said, grinning.

Ward shot Bud Jr. a withering look. Joe thought it was telling that Ward didn't counter the stories but simply turned red.

"You want me to go with you?" Joe asked, nodding toward the GMC.

"Yes, please."

"How about I follow you in?" Joe said. "I need to pick my girls up at school this afternoon so I need a vehicle. We'll be done by then, I'd guess."

Ward looked at him. "We have to be."

Joe stuffed his gloves into his back pocket and picked up his tools from the ground and handed them to Bud Jr. "I'll ask your dad to send someone out here to pick you up."

Bud's face fell. "You're just leaving me here?"

"Get some work done," Joe said, gesturing toward the fence that went on for miles. "Come on, Maxine," he called to his dog.

Bud Jr. turned away and folded his arms across his chest in a pout.

"Quite a hand," Ward said sarcastically as Joe walked past him toward the Ford.

"Yup," Joe said.

The governor's plane was the only aircraft on the tarmacat the Saddlestring Regional Airport. Joe followed Chuck Ward to a small parking lot at the side of the General Aviation building.

Joe had heard the stories about the drinking contest and the shooting range. Rulon was an enigma, which seemed to be part of his charm. A one time high-profile defense lawyer, Rulon becamea federal prosecutor who had a ninety-five percent convictionrate. Since the election, Joe had read stories in the newspaper about Rulon rushing out of his residence in his pajamasand a Russian fur cap to help state troopers on the scene of a twelve-car pileup on I-80. Another recounted how he'd been elected chairman of the Western Governors' a.s.sociation becauseof his reputation for taking on Washington bureaucrats and getting his way, which included calling hotel security to have all federal agency personnel escorted from the room of their first meeting. Each new story about Rulon's eccentricities seemed to make him more popular with voters, despite the fact that he was a Democrat in a state that was seventy percent Republican.

Governor Spencer Rulon sat behind a scarred table in the small conference room. Aerial photos of Twelve Sleep County adorned the walls, and a large picture window looked out over the runway. The table was covered with stacks of files from the governor's briefcase, which was open on a chair near him.

He stood up as Ward and Joe entered the room and thrust out his hand.

"Joe Pickett, I'm glad Chuck found you."

"Governor," Joe said, removing his hat.

"Sit down, sit down," Rulon said. "Chuck, you too."

Governor Rulon was a big man in every regard, with a round face and a big gut, an unruly shock of silver-flecked brown hair, a quick sloppy smile, and darting eyes. He was a manic presence presence, exuding energy, his movements quick and impatient. Joe had seen him work a crowd and marveled at the way Rulon could talk with lawyers, politicians, ranchers, or minimum wage clerks in their own particular language. Or, if he chose, in a languageall his own.

Ward looked at his wrist.w.a.tch. "We've got fifteen minutes before we need to leave for Powell."

"A speech for the Community College Commission," the governorsaid to Joe before settling back in his chair. "They want more money-now that's a shocker-so they'll be willing to wait."

Joe put his hat crown down on the table. He was suddenly nervous about why he'd been summoned and because there was no way to antic.i.p.ate what Rulon might do or say. Joe had a.s.sumedon the drive into town that it had something to do with the circ.u.mstances of his dismissal, but now he wasn't so sure. It was becoming clear to him by Ward's manner that the chief of staff didn't really like the purpose of the meeting, whatever it was.

"Everybody wants more money," Rulon said to Joe. "Everybodyhas their hand out. Luckily, I'm able to feed the beast."

Joe nodded in recognition of one of the governor's most familiarcatchphrases. In budget hearings, on the senate floor, at town meetings, Rulon was known for listening for a while, then standing up and shouting, "Feed the beast! Feed the beast!" "Feed the beast! Feed the beast!"

The governor turned his whole attention to Joe, and thrust his face across the table at him. "So you're a cowboy now, eh?"

Joe swallowed. "I work for my father-in-law, Bud Longbrake."

"Bud's a good man." Rulon nodded.

"I've got my resume out in five states."

Rulon shook his head. "Ain't going to happen."