Force of Nature (12 page)

“Nemecek?” Marybeth asked.

“Nate said we wouldn’t find out much about him,” Joe said. “He said he was off the grid as well.”

“No one is completely without identity.”

Joe shrugged.

“I have my ways,” she said.

He nodded. “I know you do.”

Marybeth’s part-time job at the library gave her access to data and networks that rivaled those of most local law enforcement, and certainly the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. She’d used that access to her advantage many times, and, through a coworker
who had once worked for the police department, had obtained passwords and backdoor user names that allowed her into N-DEx, the U.S. Justice Department’s National Data Exchange, and ViCAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

“I’m curious to hear what you find,” Joe said.

“Of course, we could just go to the source and
ask
him,” she said.

“I’m holding that in reserve.”

She shook her head. If it were up to Marybeth, Joe knew, she would have had Nate spilling everything.

They sat in silence for a while on the couch, each consumed by their own thoughts.

Finally, Marybeth asked, “Do you think we’ll see Nate again?”

Joe shrugged. “I hope so.”

“If he said the things you told me, he must be really worried. I’ve never heard him talk like that.”

“Me either.”

She said, “I can’t help wondering what it was he did that drew him here. What was so awful that he thinks he deserves to die?”

AT 2:30 IN THE MORNING
, Joe slipped out of bed and pulled on his robe and walked quietly down the hallway to his tiny and cluttered home office. He shut the door, turned on the light, and sat down at his computer.

Emails from Game and Fish headquarters flooded his inbox, but nothing looked urgent. The department was temporarily without a new director, and a search by the governor was under way. Governor Rulon, who in the past had employed Joe directly but off the books in a bureaucratic sense, had two years left in his second and last term and had seemed to have mellowed somewhat. Joe hadn’t received an
assignment from Rulon in more than a year, which was fine with him, although if forced to admit it, he’d come to crave the adventure and uncertainty of his missions. The respite had been healthy for his family, though, and being able to stay home was something he’d never regret.

It didn’t take long to find the falconry website Nate had given him. He took a few moments to register a username and a password, and he was in. The site was rudimentary and cluttered, no more than a screen filled with topics and comment threads:

Joe clicked on that one because he was unfamiliar with the word
yarak
and recalled Nate had used it earlier. The thread had begun more than ten years before, and the last comment was eight years old. Nevertheless, he read the thread with interest. Y
arak
was a Turkish word describing the peak condition of a falcon to fly and hunt. It was described as “full of stamina, well-muscled, alert, neither too fat nor too thin, perfect condition for hunting and killing prey. This state is rarely achieved but a wonder to behold when observed.” In order to achieve an optimum state of
yarak
, one commenter wrote, full-time care, exercise, diet, and training were required.

“Don’t think you can get your bird into primo
yarak
by working with
it at night or on weekends. This is a twenty-four/seven commitment, and there are no guarantees.”

Joe didn’t expect to find a new thread with the word “kestrel” in it, and it wasn’t there.

He wondered if Nate would launch the thread before he achieved his state of
yarak
.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER
, on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Bad Bob Whiteplume had a dream in which he was hunting for pronghorn antelope. As he raised his rifle, a car horn blared from somewhere behind him and spooked the buck. He watched in vain as the pronghorn he wanted zoomed away and turned its small contingent of does and fawns, and the herd raced away trailing a dozen plumes of dust. The horn wouldn’t stop, and he rolled over in bed and wrapped the pillow around his head and it helped a little. In his dream, the buck antelope he’d been after had run so far away Bob would never get a decent shot.

When Rhonda next to him elbowed him in the ribs, he opened his eyes to total darkness. But he could still hear the horn.

“Bob,” she said, “get up. There’s someone outside.”

“Who is it?” he croaked.

“How in the hell should I know? But it’s nearly three in the morning and somebody is sitting out front in their car, honking their fucking
horn
.”

“Go make them stop,” he said, scooting farther away from her and her elbow and her yammering. He wanted to go back to the antelope
hunt. “And don’t turn on the light or they’ll know I’m back here and they’ll keep honking.”

The house had been built long before his grandfather had added the convenience store to the front of it. The two structures were joined via a metal door with several bolt locks on it he always forgot to secure.

This came in handy because if Bob and his buddies did too much alcohol or weed, Bob could crash in his own bed without having to drive anywhere. But sleeping so close to his day job came with annoyances. Like this. All the Indians were family on the reservation, which was fine, usually. There was always someone to borrow tools or bullets from. But familiarity sometimes meant neighbors didn’t honor rules, like when a store was open or closed.

“No,” she said, prying his hand and pillow away from his ear and leaning into him. “
I’m
not going out there. You go make them stop.”

“Give it a minute,” Bob grumbled. “They’ll realize I’m not coming out and they’ll go away.”

She huffed a long stream of air into the back of his neck from her nostrils as she sighed in frustration. There was a few seconds of silence.

“See?” Bob said, closing his eyes.

Then the horn resumed: a long blast, followed by several short blasts, followed by the long blast again.

“They’re not leaving,” she hissed.

“Okay, okay,” he growled, swinging his thick brown legs out from beneath the sheets. The floor was cold when his wide bare feet slapped it. “But I’m going to tear those knuckleheads a new one.”

“Just make them stop,” Rhonda said, collapsing back into bed.

Rhonda liked showing up around closing time and staying the night. She was a thick white woman with red hair and broad hips originally from Boston, who had shown up in Wyoming after a
messy divorce looking for, she said, spirituality and something that would give her life meaning. Hence, she gravitated toward the folks on the res and provided free mental-health-care services at the tribal center one day a week.

She ran the only psychology practice in the little town of Winchester to the north, and she said she liked the idea of being a shrink to ranch wives and other assorted miscreants during the day and sleeping with an angry Indian at night, that somehow it gave her existence a kind of balance. She told Bob she considered herself a liaison between white problems and Indian problems, and maybe someday she’d write a book about her experiences. Bob doubted anyone would buy or read such a useless book, but he didn’t tell her that.

Before he could get her into bed, Bob had to answer her questions about native culture and beliefs and practices. He made them sound more mysterious than they were, and he made up a lot of it on the spot. For example, he had shown her the mottled scars on his chest and claimed they’d come from participating in a traditional sun dance where warriors pierced their pectoral muscles with sharpened bones and let themselves be hoisted into the air on rawhide ropes until they obtained their visions or the flesh ripped. Actually, the scars were a result of a motorcycle accident when Bob was a teenager. But no matter. It got her engine running, which was the point.

She begged him to take her to a sweat lodge someday, to show her how to do a vision quest, to let her see the actual sun dance (where dancers no longer pierced themselves or hung from ropes). He told her she’d have to earn those privileges by submitting to him and “his hot-blooded ways.” He suspected at times she was onto him—she was a psychologist, after all—but she didn’t put up any objection or question his stories or his motives. So one or two times a week he took her to bed, where she showed dexterity and a youthful hunger that decried her appearance and profession. Afterward, she’d rise
early and drive back to Winchester before he got up, so he didn’t even have to feed her.

HIS MOOD
was very, very dark as he stood and fished around on the chair through a pile of old clothes. He pulled on a pair of baggy gym trunks and a grease-stained hooded sweatshirt. His flip-flops were side by side under the bed, and he stepped into them.

“Come back soon,” she sang from bed. “I’m wide awake now.”

“Go back to sleep.”

The .30-30 lever-action Winchester was propped in the corner, and he grabbed it by the barrel as he walked by and shuffled down the hallway.

Maybe, he thought, the people outside honking their horn were visitors to the res, because locals would have known by now he wasn’t coming out. They’d know he meant business when they looked up and saw a big pissed-off Indian approaching the car with a hunting rifle.

He pushed through the steel door into his retail store. It was dim inside; the only lights were from the drink coolers. He paused at the front of his store and squinted, trying to see who was in the offending car. But because the bulb on the overhead pole light had been shot out recently—teenagers Darryl and Benny Edmo and their new pellet gun, he suspected—he couldn’t see much more than the outline of a vehicle in the moonlight on the other side of the gas pumps. One of the pumps blocked his view of the driver, but he could see no other occupants in the car.

Bad Bob slammed back the bolt locks and threw open the front door. Without the barrier, the blaring of the horn was louder and more infuriating than before.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Knock it off!” But his voice was drowned out.

Bob strode across the loose gravel on blacktop, ignoring the sharp little stones that wedged between his bare toes and between the soles of his feet and the flip-flops.

“KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF!” he bellowed, and worked the lever action on his rifle with a swift and metallic
clatch-clatch
sound.

The horn ceased.

Bob said,
“Thank you!”

Overhead, the full moon hung fat and low over the western mountains. As he glanced at it, he noticed a distant hawk cross over the white/blue surface like a miller moth dancing across a porch light. The hawk gave him pause, and something inside of him stirred a little.
What?
he thought.
Does it have some kind of meaning?
The old folks still talked as if everything that happened in the natural world had meaning outside of the obvious, but Bob never paid any attention to that stuff. But something tweaked him inside now and he couldn’t entirely ignore it.

He squeezed between the pumps to confront the driver, when a flashlight beam blinded him.

“Hey,” he said, raising his left forearm to block the light.

“Bad Bob, right?” came a male voice. It was somewhat familiar. A white voice.

“Get that light outta my face. I can’t see. Buddy,” Bob said, “do you know what fucking
time
it is?”

Although the light clicked off, all Bob could see was a round green orb burned into his eyes. He heard the car door open, though, and just as quickly the rifle was wrenched out of his right hand.

“Fuckin …” Bob started to say, but he heard the shuffle of someone behind him and something icy and sharp bit into his throat and squeezed off any further words as well as his breath.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” the voice said calmly in his right ear. “But you’ll need to stop struggling. Do you understand?”

Bob tried to draw air in through his nose, but the cord—or wire—around his throat restricted that, too. He reached up involuntarily with both hands to feel what was choking him, but the man slapped his hands down.

“Relax. I’m not going to hurt you. I just need some information.”

Bob could feel his heart whumping, and a voice inside his head told him to stay still. He lowered his hands and rocked back slightly, which lessened the pressure of the thin wire noose—or whatever it was. His eyes had readjusted to the dark, and he glanced toward his store, hoping Rhonda would see what was happening at the front door. She wasn’t there.

“Do you remember me?” the man asked, his lips inches from Bob’s ear. “Do you recognize my car?”

Despite the biting pain it caused, Bob managed to shake his head. Even though he remembered the Audi Q7.

The man behind him chuckled. “Oh, we both wish it were so. Now, listen to me carefully, Bob. I’m going to ease up on you so you can talk. Like I said, all I need is information. Then, if you help me out and you don’t turn around and you walk straight back into your little store, everything will be fine. You’ll have an abrasion on your neck, but that’s all. Do you hear me?”