Below Zero (20 page)

 

 

 

AS JOE EASED OUT
of the driveway in his pickup, he looked at his house. Marybeth was in the front picture window with Lucy, who looked stricken. Through the window, Joe could see her mouth,
She’s my sister, too . . .
and it was like a knife through his heart.

Joe and Sheridan waved, and Sheridan hid her face from him while she cried.

 

 

THE FULL MOON IN THE CLOUDLESS SKY CAST THE PRAIRIE grass ghostly white/blue and threw impenetrable black shadows into the hollows of the hills and draws as Joe and Sheridan drove east on I-90 and crossed the Powder River. The river in the fall was no more than an exhausted stream marking time until winter came and put it out of its misery. Despite that, mule deer huddled on its banks and ancient cottonwoods sucked at the thin stream of water in order to provide the only shade and cover for miles.

Joe knew of a two-track ranch access road with an unlocked gate that would allow them to cut the corner of their journey and eventually intersect with Highway 50 and Savageton, although the likelihood of finding April still there seemed remote at best.

Although it was an interstate highway, there was no traffic at two-fifteen in the morning. Big semi-rigs were parked at pullouts with running lights on, and as they roared east, the twinkle of working oil and gas rigs dotted the prairie. This was the western frontier of the Powder River Basin. Under the thin crust of dirt were underground mountains of coal, rivers of oil and natural gas, seams of uranium. A bald eagle nearly as big as the one he’d delivered to Nate fed on a road-killed pronghorn antelope on the shoulder of the highway, and the bird barely looked up as the pickup sizzled by.

Sheridan was wide awake and filled with manic energy that no doubt came from both fear and exhilaration. The moonlight kissed her cheeks, and Joe was glad she was with him as well as concerned that she was. Her cell phone was in her lap.

“Do you have a signal?” he asked.

“Three bars,” she said.

“Good. Let me know if we start to get out of range. We can’t afford to miss a call or a text.”

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said. “I mean, go on an investigation with you.”

Joe said, “I know. But you’ll have to be careful. You’ll really have to listen to me. This isn’t a game.”

“I
know
that.”

He nodded in the dark. She was miffed at him for stating the obvious, and he wondered why he’d felt the need to do so.

He kept the radio tuned to SALECS, which stood for State Assisted Law Enforcement Communication System, and listened as Coon and the FBI talked with the highway patrol. The HP had units in Gillette, Wright, Moorcroft, and Sundance, and all were rolling toward the checkpoint they’d agreed upon near Rozet, east of Gillette. The local police departments in Gillette, Moorcroft, and Hulett were sending officers as well. The operation was going smoothly, although the HP was obviously annoyed they didn’t know what kind of vehicle they were looking for or who would be in it.

“Two male subjects and possibly more,” Coon had said in response, giving a description for David Stenson, aka Stenko. Robert was described as Stenko’s son, but Coon said there was no physical description yet. He said they thought they’d have a photo of him within the hour and they would e-mail it for distribution. Joe was intrigued. Where did they find a photo of Robert so quickly in the middle of the night? Did Robert have priors as well? If so, Marybeth had not found any arrests on her Internet search.

As he usually did in anticipation of a confrontation, Joe did a mental inventory of his gear in addition to his weapons. On his belt was pepper spray, handcuffs, spare Glock magazines, and his Leatherman tool. He was a poor pistol shot so he’d rely on the shotgun if he ran into Stenko and Robert. But he prayed it wouldn’t come to that with Sheridan and possibly April present.

Joe maintained radio silence, but he was urged to grab the mike and tell the officers they should be looking for two adult males and one teenage female. But he couldn’t risk it. Not yet. As always, he doubted himself and fought against a compulsion to tell them what he knew. If Stenko, Robert, and April slipped through the checkpoint because the HP wasn’t looking for a girl with them, the guilt would eat him alive. Not only that, he could be brought up on charges for withholding information. But if local cops, buzzed on coffee and adrenaline—
or
the Highway Patrol
or
the FBI—overreacted as they had six years before and April was injured or killed, he’d never forgive himself. He didn’t realize he’d just moaned aloud until Sheridan asked him what was wrong.

“Nothing,” he said. He slowed and eased to the right of the highway because he didn’t want to shoot past the shortcut road.

“You can tell me,” Sheridan said. “Is it that you want to tell them to look for April?”

Joe grunted.

“We can’t,” she said, shaking her head in a gesture that could have been Marybeth’s. “Not yet. Not until I get a chance to see if it’s really her. We can’t let her down again.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want her to think I snitched on her, too.”

“Gotcha,” Joe said, turning off the pavement toward a sagging wire gate. Sheridan climbed out, opened it, and closed it again after Joe pulled through. He used the opportunity to dig his shotgun out from behind the seat, check the loads, and prop it, muzzle down, between the seats. He watched Sheridan skip toward the pickup through a roll of dust turned incendiary by his brake lights.

The two-track cut through the knee-high dry grass, and the uneven surface of the ranch road rattled everything that wasn’t secured in the cab of the pickup. Instinctively, Sheridan reached up and grasped the loop handle above the door and braced her other hand against the dashboard to steady herself.

“Do we have to listen to that?” Sheridan asked, gesturing to the radio. There was lots of chatter as law enforcement assembled on I-90.

“Yes.”

“We can’t listen to music?”

“No.”

“I’ve got a question,” she said.

“Shoot.”

“Do you think that the day you stop listening to new music is the day you decide you’re on the path to old age? Like you’ve given up on new stuff and you resign yourself to music you’ve already heard? Like you’re through discovering and all you want to do is rummage through your old things?”

Joe jerked the steering wheel to the left to avoid a rabbit in the right track that refused to move. He said, “I don’t know how to answer that.”

Sheridan said, “I think I’m right. That’s why I’m never going to listen to old music. I’m only going to listen to what’s new on the radio.”

“You might change your mind when you get older,” Joe said. “Don’t you think you’ll miss the songs you’re familiar with?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the new songs will be better.”

“It’s possible. But don’t you find that certain songs remind you of certain things in your life? That when you hear a specific song it takes you back to when you were listening to it?”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “But then I’d be thinking backward and not forward. I’d be on the way to geezerhood.”

“Like me,” Joe said.

“Like you
and
Mom.”

He smiled in the dark.

“I mean, Mom listens to that old stuff when she’s in the car. People like Simon and Garfunkel, the Police, Loggins and Messina. I’m not saying it’s all bad but it
is
old. Pretty sad, huh?”

“Not really,” Joe said.

“Do you still have those CDs I made for you of new music?”

“Somewhere,” Joe confessed. They might be in the console or glove box, he wasn’t sure. Wherever they were, he hadn’t listened to them recently. “Sorry,” he said.

“See, you’re the same way.”

“I guess so.”

She paused, then said what was obviously heavy on her mind. “What if it’s April who’s pulling the trigger?”

“What if she’s so messed up she’s turned into some kind of teenage killer? Think about it. She has a lot to be messed up about. She might be a no-hoper.”

“Sheridan, jeez . . .”

“She used to be pretty mean,” Sheridan said. “When she first came to live with us, I was kind of scared of her, but I never let her know that. It wasn’t until the end that she kind of opened up. Don’t you remember how mean she could be?”

Joe remembered. But they’d chalked it up to her transient childhood and to the presence of her on-again, off-again mother, Jeannie Keeley. April’s hardness was a tactic against getting hurt or betrayed, they’d decided. April tested them early on with outbursts and rudeness, but Marybeth said she was simply probing to see where the boundaries were. Once April found out there were limits and rules in the family, she visibly softened and relaxed. April, Joe thought, was like a horse. She needed to know what was expected of her and where she fit in the herd. Once she knew both she was all right.

Sheridan said, “April scared her teachers, she told me that. Every kid wants to be feared by adults. And the truth is a lot of adults fear us. You can see it in their eyes. It gives us power, you know? We’re like vampires. We feed off adults being scared of us. I could see April being pushed into hurting somebody.”

He said, “Sheridan, let’s not speculate too much until we have some kind of evidence, okay?”

Which didn’t stop her. She said, “What if we find her and she’s so messed up we know she’ll kill again? What do we do then?”

“Stop it,” he said. “We don’t know if she’s done anything wrong in the first place.”

Sheridan nodded, apparently thinking that over. She said, “No matter what, I miss her,” she said. “Toward the end there, I was really starting to like her and I thought it was cool how she looked up to me. She must still feel that way or she never would have started texting me.

“I remember when she lived with us,” Sheridan said, almost dreamily. “I came down the hall to get a drink of water at night and I heard you and Mom talking. I remember you saying you wondered if April was doomed.”

“I don’t remember saying that,” Joe said, although he could vaguely recall similar conversations.

“What if
she
heard you say that? What if it stuck with her? Do you think that would mess her up?”

They crested a hill and the countryside opened up ahead of them. In the distance were the Pumpkin Buttes; four massive flat-topped cone-shaped land formations that dominated the southern horizon. They looked like crude sand castles formed by inverted God-sized buckets. Moonlight bathed the tops of the buttes, which shone like four blue disks.

“Wow,” Sheridan said. “Those things are awesome-looking.”

“I’ve been on top of them,” Joe said, grateful to change the subject.

“What is it like up there?”

He told her how he’d climbed to the top of the middle butte and walked around. The surface was as flat as a tabletop, covered with short grass. Chippings from arrowheads and other tools winked in the grass like jewels, and there were a half-dozen campfire and tipi rings where the Indians used to camp. The height of the buttes afforded them protection from other bands because the view was unparalleled: oceans of treeless prairie to the east, north, and south. He told Sheridan he could see until the land met the sky and vanished. To the west was the knotty blue spine of the Big Horn Mountains.

“I’d like to climb them someday,” she said. “I’ve never found an arrowhead.”

“Look,” Joe said suddenly, “I’ve done and said things in the past I regret. I wish I could take some things back. You’ll understand someday. But getting a second chance to save April means a lot to me right now. So let’s concentrate on that, okay?”

Sheridan nodded. “Okay.”

“No more speculating.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll shut up.”

“You don’t have to shut up,” Joe said. “Just quit bringing up things that give me a stomachache. I’ve got to concentrate.”

She laughed, “So what is your opinion about never listening to old music?”

 

 

 

AS THEY DESCENDED
on the two-track, Joe pointed out the windshield at a tight cluster of blue lights on the prairie floor to the northeast. “See that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s Savageton.”

“That’s all there is?”

“Yup.”

Joe’s cell phone lit up and rang: Coon.

“Yes, Chuck?”

Joe could hear a roar in the background and recognized it as the ascending whine of helicopter rotors. He was surprised how quickly the FBI had located their pilots and fueled the helicopter. It sounded like they were ready to scramble.

Coon had to shout: “Damn it, Joe. You’re holding out on us.”

“What are you talking about?” Joe asked, wondering if Coon and Portenson had learned about April.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Coon yelled. “The subject fired up the cell phone a half hour ago. Are you telling me your daughter didn’t get a call or a text?”

Joe slowed to a stop on the two-track and jammed the pickup into park. He glanced over at Sheridan, who’d heard Coon shouting.

Sheridan shrugged and checked her cell, just in case. “No new texts,” she said, looking at the display, “and I still have a strong signal.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “We’ve heard nothing. Do your contacts say calls are being made?”

“Yes, but we’re not sure which numbers were called. We don’t have that information yet,” Coon said. “The night staff at the phone company isn’t up on the tracing procedure, I’m afraid. But we do know the phone is on and starting to move.”

Joe felt a tremor in his face muscles. So April had been at Savageton all this time? And was just now starting to drive away? He dug beneath his seat for his spotting scope while Coon said, “Yeah, we’re tracking it going south on Highway Fifty, which is
the wrong way
! They’re supposed to be headed north to I-Ninety, where we’ve got the roadblock set up!”