Cold Wind (28 page)

“I learned this from a friend,” Joe said. “Remember Nate Romanowski? Now tell me what I want to know or I’ll twist your ear off. I’ve seen a couple of ears come off. They make a kind of popping sound, like when you break a chicken wing apart. You know that sound? I’d guess it’s even worse from the inside, you know?”

“Please . . . Joe, this isn’t like you.” There were tears of pain in his eyes.

Joe nodded. It wasn’t. Whatever. He twisted. Bud Jr. opened his mouth to scream.

“No yelling,” Joe said. “If you yell, you lose the ear. And if that happens, you’ve got another ear I can pull off. Then it will be real hard to listen to Death Cab for Cutie.”

Shamazz closed his mouth, but there were guttural sounds coming out from deep in his chest.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

“I wanted to come home,”
Bud Jr. said, spitting out the words.
“I just wanted to come home.”

Joe was taken aback. He said, “But you don’t
have
a home. Bud Sr. lost the ranch. You knew that.”

“Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow,”
Bud Jr. said.

“We never took advantage of your dad,” Joe said. “Missy did. You did. But I
worked
for him.”

“Now where can I find your dad?” Joe asked, keeping the pressure on.

“You really don’t know?
You really don’t?
”

“Tell me why you’re here.”

He yelped, “I’m here to reclaim what’s mine.”

Joe said, “Nothing’s yours anymore.” But when he saw the wild-eyed passion in Bud Jr.’s eyes—passion he’d never seen before—Joe wondered if Shamazz was capable of murder, or at least willing to help out his father. He’d never thought of the kid that way before.

After he said to Bud Jr., “Tell me everything,” Joe noted movement in his peripheral vision and glanced up to see a sheriff’s department SUV cruise through the opening between the drugstore and the bar. Sollis was at the wheel. Had he been seen?

Joe involuntarily eased up on the ear, and Shamazz took full advantage of the sudden release of pressure. From where he sat on the garbage-covered pathway, he was able to reach back and fire a roundhouse punch that caught Joe full force in the temple. The blow made Joe let go, and staggered him. Bud Jr. scrambled to his feet and punched again, clipping Joe across the jaw and dropping him. Joe tried to protect his face against a fury of Hacky Sack-conditioned feet, but Bud Jr. was fueled by anger and desperation, and several hard kicks hit home. Joe rolled away, felt two sharp thumps in his back along his spine and one near his kidneys, and by the time he was able to right himself and struggle to his hands and knees, Shamazz had run away.

Joe stayed like that for a long time. His head and face ached sharply, and as his shock wore off, the kicks to his arms, shoulders, neck, and back began to pound.

Moaning, he managed to lean against the brick wall and vertically crabwalk up until he could balance on his feet again. He probed at his head for blood, but didn’t find any. He hoped like hell Sollis wouldn’t drive by again and see him. He wanted no one to see him.

 

 

As he limped
to his pickup, Joe looked at his right hand—the one that had twisted Bud Jr.’s ear nearly off—as if it belonged to someone else. Like Nate, maybe.

Bud Jr. had fought like a wild man. Partly out of self-defense and partly out of something inside him that was of greater intensity than Joe’s urge to protect himself. In a way, he admired Bud Jr., while he felt ashamed of himself both for the pressure he’d applied and for opening himself up for the attack.

Angry with himself, Joe climbed into his pickup. He looked into his own eyes in the rearview mirror, wondering who was looking back.

 

 

Ten minutes later,
when he thought he’d recovered enough to find his voice again, he dug his phone out of his pocket—it was undamaged—and it rang before he could call Marybeth. The display indicated it was his wife calling
him
.

“Hi,” he croaked.

She paused. “Joe, are you all right?”

“Dandy,” he said.

“Your voice sounds different.”

He grunted.

“Look,” she said, “I had to call you right away. There’re some things about the company Rope the Wind that I find really fishy. I’ve been on the Internet all afternoon, and I can’t find the answer to some questions that just pop right out at me.”

“Like what?” he said. He shifted in his seat because the places on his back where Shamazz had kicked him were sore. He’d had his ribs broken before, and he knew they’d not been fractured. Overall, he was okay, but it would be a while before he knew if anything was bruised or damaged.

“I located the original articles of incorporation application online at the secretary of state’s office,” she said. “Earl wasn’t originally on the board five years ago. Five years is an eternity as far as wind energy companies go. Five years is
ancient
.

“The chairman and CEO was a man named Orin Smith,” she said. “He listed his address as a post office box in Cheyenne. So of course the next step was to find out what I could about Orin Smith and see if I could connect him to Earl.”

Joe
hmmmmmmm’d
to keep her going.

She said, “I came back with thousands of hits. And this is where it gets strange. Orin Smith is apparently the chairman and CEO of
hundreds
of companies incorporated in Wyoming. They run the gamut from energy companies like Rope the Wind to crazy ones like ‘Prairie Enterprises,’ ‘Bighorn Manufacturing,’ ‘Rocky Mountain Internet,’ ‘Cowboy Cookies’ . . . all kinds of companies.”

Joe grunted, and said, “A couple of those sound sort of familiar.”

“I thought so, too,” she said, “but that’s the really weird thing. They’re just names. They sound like companies you hear about, but they don’t really exist.”

Joe shook his head, “What?”

“None of them seem to produce anything. There’s no record of them after incorporation. Beyond the name itself, these companies just seem to be sitting there.”

“I’m lost,” he said.

“I am, too. I don’t get it. And I don’t understand at all how Earl Alden came into the picture.”

Joe said, “We might be really going the wrong direction here. This doesn’t seem to fit any kind of scheme I can think of.”

“I know.”

Then she said, “But I found one thing of interest.”

“Yes?”

“I think I know where we can find Orin Smith.”

“Fire away,” he said.

“He’s in federal custody in Cheyenne. It’s amazing what one can find with a simple Google search of a name.”

“What are the charges?”

“Let’s see,” she said, and Joe could hear her tapping keys. “Securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, international money laundering to promote specified unlawful activity, money laundering . . . on and on. Eleven counts in all.”

“Which agency’s got him?”

“FBI.”

“Good,” he said, putting his pen down. “Someone owes me a favor there.”

 

 

Before he punched off,
Joe said, “Ask your mother what she knows about Bud Jr. being back in town. I think she’s hiding something.”

“Bud Jr.? You mean Shamazz?”

“Yeah. I just had a run-in with him in town. I didn’t get the best of it and I lost him.”

He resolved to tell more her about the encounter later. Much later.

“Call me with what she says,” Joe said.

“When will you be home?”

“I won’t,” he replied, looking into the visor mirror at the swelling and bruises beginning to show on his cheekbone and jaw. “I’m driving all night to Cheyenne to talk to Orin Smith.”

 

 

As he drove south
out of Saddlestring, he scrolled through the contact list on his phone until he found the name for Special Agent Chuck Coon.

“Now,
run,
”
Nate Romanowski said to Johnny Cook and Drennen O’Melia.

“Man,” Drennen said, “you can’t make us do this. It’s cruel.”

“You can’t,” Johnny echoed.

Nate arched his eyebrows and said low and breathy, “I can’t?”

He’d silently marched them a mile east from Gasbag Jim’s place, in the direction of the Wind River Range, with the informant, Lisa, the dark-haired girl who’d learned their names and made the identification, in tow. She was coffee-and-cream color with dark eyes and high cheekbones. Her large breasts swelled against her white tank top. Short, muscular but shapely legs powered her through the sagebrush. She dangled a pair of strappy high heels from her finger because they hurt to walk in.

Nate guided Johnny and Drennen’s progress by gesturing at them with the muzzle of the .500 Wyoming Express the way a trainer instructs bird dogs with hand signals. The sun was behind them at eye level, minutes before dusk, and the four of them cast long shadows across the sagebrush and dried cheat grass. Johnny Cook was still in his underwear and boots.

“What do you mean, run?” Drennen asked. “You gonna shoot us in the back?”

Nate shrugged. He said, “I’m giving you more of a chance than you deserve. It’s an old Indian trick. You ever heard of Colter’s Run?”

“Colter’s what?” Johnny said.

“I have,” Lisa offered. “Blackfeet, right?”

“Right,” Nate said to her over his shoulder. Then he turned his attention back to the two men. “Eighteen-oh-eight, at the site of the present day Three Forks, Montana. The Blackfeet captured John Colter, the first white man to discover Yellowstone Park. They didn’t know what to do with him: kill him like they’d just done to his partner John Potts, or strip him naked and let him run. They decided on the old Indian trick, and gave him a few feet head start before they chased him down. What they didn’t know was that Colter was
fast
. He managed to outrun all the warriors except one. As he got close to the river, the Blackfoot who kept up threw his spear at Colter but missed, and Colter snatched it up and used it on the poor guy, killing him.

“Then Colter jumped into a river,” Nate said, “and over the next few days managed to elude the entire band by hiding in driftwood snarls along the banks while the Blackfeet searched for him. Eventually, Colter got away and worked his way back east over the next few years. In the end, he married a woman named Sallie.

“So,” Nate said, “a happy ending for John Colter.”

“Nice story,” Drennen said. “But this is stupid. I ain’t running nowhere.”

Nate grinned at him and said nothing.

“Oh, shit,” Johnny lamented, reading the malevolence in Nate’s cruel smile. He glanced up in the dusk sky that was deep powder blue except for the fiery puffball clouds lit by the evening sun. “I knew when I saw that damned bird . . .”

Nate said, “Not my bird. But it worked out kind of nice, didn’t it?”

“
I
thought that was your bird,” Lisa said. “Like it was your spirit or something. We believe in stuff like that, you know.” There was a particular musical lilt to her voice that reminded Nate of why he was there. As if he needed reminding.

Nate smiled at her. “You go on believing that if you want.”

“Yeah,” Drennen said, balling his fists and taking a step toward her. “Believe what you want, you snitch. You snitch
whore
.”

Nate raised the revolver and Drennen looked up to see the massive O of the muzzle. He stopped cold.

“You know her as Lisa Rich,” Nate said softly. “I know her as Lisa Whiteplume. My woman’s stepsister from the res. My woman was named Alisha. You two killed her.”

Identified, Lisa thrust her chin in the air and put her hands on her hips defiantly. Proudly. Drennen stepped back.

Nate said to Lisa, “See what I told you about his type. He doesn’t really like you. Even when you’re in there thrashing around doing what makes him happy, he
despises
you for it. The more you please him, the more contemptuous he is of you, which is a pretty good indicator of what he thinks of himself deep down. Will you learn from that?”

She sighed, but she wouldn’t meet Nate’s eyes. “I guess.”

“Oh,
shit
,” Johnny repeated with even more emphasis than before. “Drennen, you need to shut up now.”

“But, man,” Drennen said to Johnny, “he can’t prove anything. He says we did something to his girlfriend, but he can’t prove it was us.”

“You don’t understand,” Nate said. “I don’t need to prove anything. It doesn’t work like that with me.”

Johnny asked, “Then how can you be sure it was us? What if it was somebody else?”

“Putting you two down is a net plus either way,” Nate said. “Honestly, I’m insulted anyone would send a couple of mouth-breathers like you after me, and angry you got so close. And for the record, you left fingerprints and DNA at the scene. I got the beer bottle you left checked out by some friends in law enforcement. The name ‘Drennen O’Melia’ came back. And it didn’t take long to find out he hangs with a loser named Johnny Cook.”

Johnny turned on Drennen, accusatory, as if now remembering the beer bottle they left on the trail.

Then, squinting at Nate, said, “You’re that guy, aren’t you? How’d you get away?”

“I wasn’t in the cave,” Nate said. “But somebody I cared about was.”

To Drennen, Nate said, “Looks like you got a faceful of that rocket launcher, pard.”

“Please,” Drennen said, pleading with his hands outstretched toward Nate and Lisa, “I didn’t pull the trigger. It wasn’t me.”

Johnny listened with his face twisted in anger and betrayal. He thought of the gophers. He said, “It wasn’t our idea. We were under the influence of alcohol and this lady we met in Saddlestring put us up to it. It was
her
idea. She hired us, and she drove us out there, gave us that rocket launcher, and paid us for the job. We were like”—he paused, thinking for the right word—“her
puppets
.”