Below Zero (23 page)

She pulled her blanket tight and leaned forward, lowering her voice as if to tell Joe a secret. He bent toward her. The smell of cigarette smoke and souring alcohol was overwhelming. “See, he’s officially helping the cops on some cases and he’s not supposed to be messing with alcohol or drugs anymore. That’s his part of the deal. And he’s not supposed to have a gun. But when that helicopter showed up, he just lost it. He didn’t want to get caught, I guess. I told him to stop but he pointed his gun at
me
and told me shut up.” She said the last part indignantly, and Joe nodded.

“Back to the bar,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Who else was there? Anyone you didn’t know?”

She shook her head, “Just energy guys. You know, hardworking Americans providing power for the rest of the country so they can all look down on us with their lights on. Oil guys, coal miners, gas guys. Some juggies and some surveyors loading up before they had to go home. Badger was there, of course.”

“Mm-hmm,” he said, scribbling, encouraging her to keep talking. A surprising number of witnesses loved to have their words inscribed, he’d found over the years. It made them feel important that their words mattered to someone. It was the same impulse some people had to immediately commence talking whenever a television camera was around.

“What I’m wondering,” Joe said, “was if there was anyone in the bar you didn’t recognize? Or maybe they just didn’t fit?”

She gnawed on her fingers and looked up at the sky and closed her eyes. “Thinking,” she said aloud. Then she snapped her fingers. “There were two guys sitting in back by themselves,” she said. “I remember them now. One older guy and one handsome dude, but in an Eastern, kind of faggy bark-beetle way . . .”

Joe interrupted. “What do you mean by that? Did he look homosexual?”

She laughed huskily and shook her head. “No, worse. He looked like an environmentalist. I can spot ’em a mile away. You know how some people have ‘gay-dar’ when it comes to picking out gay people? Bo said I had ‘Gore-dar,’ the ability to pick out whacko enviros. You know, after Al Gore.”

“Got it,” Joe said, suppressing a sigh.

“Anyway, they sat a back table keeping to themselves. I think they were arguing about something. Badger kept delivering them drinks. I noted they shut up every time he took drinks over to them, like they didn’t want him to hear what they were talking about. That was unusual because everybody around here knows everyone else’s business. Well, they acted like they were having a big important discussion. The good-looking enviro had a laptop out, and he kept pointing at the screen to the old guy.”

Joe paused. “Can you describe them a little better? I don’t have Gore-dar.”

She giggled. “Sure. The old guy was big—he had a big head and a big face. Dark hair, mustache. Mid- to late sixties, I guess. He was dressed pretty well in that he wasn’t wearing Wranglers. Definitely not from around here. He had nice eyes—I remember that. Maybe six foot or a little over. Maybe, I don’t know, two hundred and fifty pounds? The one with the laptop had wavy brown hair and his shirt was open too much for around here. Like I said, handsome in a faggy way.”

Joe thought,
Stenko and Robert.

“Was anyone with them?” he asked.

“Not that I can remember.”

“A teenage girl, maybe?”

She barked a laugh. “Believe me, mister, if there was a teenage girl in that joint, I woulda known about her! I was the only female in the place!”

Joe nodded. “You mentioned you went outside a couple of times. Did you see anyone in any cars?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t look,” she said. “I was, you know, getting high.”

He paused, thinking what to ask.

Then she said, “Hey, I remember something. Bo came back in once. He’d gone outside to piss. He likes—liked—to piss outside rather than inside. One of his quirks. Anyway, he sat down by me and said there was an underage girl out there in one of the cars who saw him pissing. He said she was kinda cute. I smacked him. I thought he was shitting me about seeing a girl. You know, hallucinating. Are you saying he wasn’t?”

PORTENSON MADE CALL after call with a satellite phone. He was lit by the green glow of the instrument panel. He looked distressed and angry. The pilot sat silently next to him but made it a point to look away as if he found something out in the dark sagebrush worth careful study. The pilot wore sunglasses and headphones. Joe guessed he’d wear a grocery bag on his head if one were available.

Coon stood for a long time looking at the body of Bo Skelton behind the wheel of the pickup and cursing. Joe asked Coon to watch his language in deference to Sheridan, who leaned against the grille of Joe’s pickup with her arms crossed. Her cell phone, as always, was in her hand. Joe felt the need every ten minutes or so to approach her and give her a hug or a squeeze until she finally asked him to relax. She insisted she was okay, that the events of the night hadn’t traumatized her in any way.

“Don’t go near that SUV,” Joe cautioned. He’d caught a glimpse of Skelton’s body earlier. Machine-gun fire had practically gutted him and there were two bullet holes neatly spaced in his forehead like another set of eyes. Joe was thankful it had been a long time since he’d eaten anything or he likely would have lost it, like Coon had.

“I’ll stay where I am,” she said. “Should I call Mom and let her know we’re okay?”

“Yes, please.”

 

 

 

THERE WAS A THUMP
on the inside of the Plexiglas bubble as Portenson smacked it with the heel of his hand. Joe looked up from where he was with Sheridan. Portenson was obviously furious and sharing his frustrations with the pilot, who listened without removing his sunglasses or headphones.

The FBI supervisor opened the hatch and climbed out. Joe said to Sheridan, “Hope he doesn’t scorch your ears.”

Sheridan said, “You are
so
protective.”

Portenson paced and spoke as much to himself as to Coon in the distance. “We have to stay right here and wait. So forget trying to find Stenko for the time being. The powers that be are sending up an incident team from Denver, and our orders are to stay right here and not touch anything. Like we’re a couple of suspects. Touch nothing! Hear that?”

Coon grunted in the dark.

“I think this was a righteous shoot,” Portenson said. “I think we did everything by the book. Why that son of a bitch started firing at us, I’ll never know. What the hell was wrong with him? Did he have a death wish or something?”

From the tailgate of Joe’s pickup, Cyndi Mote said, “Bo was paranoid. But you didn’t need to
kill
him for that.”

Joe said, “I’ll testify to what I saw. You guys handled everything the best you could. You had no reason to believe it wasn’t Stenko. And Skelton did shoot first.”

Portenson looked at Joe as if he’d forgotten he was there. The FBI agent sized him up, waiting for another shoe to drop. It didn’t.

“Your action was justified,” Joe said.

“I appreciate you saying you’d be willing to tell them what you saw and heard.”

Joe said, “Yup.”

“Because I know if you wanted to, you could hang me out to dry.”

Joe said, “I could and maybe I should. But I saw what I saw.” He put his hand on Sheridan’s shoulder. “
We
saw what we saw.”

Portenson looked almost embarrassed. “Thank you, Joe.”

TO THE EAST THE SKY
took on a rosy cream color as dawn approached. Several Highway Patrol vehicles had found them and the troopers helped set up a perimeter. From whom, Joe wasn’t certain. Local police from Gillette, Moorcroft, and Hulett drove out to look at the pickup, Skelton’s body, and to count the bullet holes in the top of the SUV and whistle. Everyone waited for the FBI incident team to find them and clear the scene.

Coon wandered over and joined Joe and Sheridan leaning against Joe’s pickup. He looked ten years older than when Joe had seen him the afternoon before.

“You okay?” Joe asked.

“What do you think?”

Joe didn’t respond.

“Man, oh man,” Coon said. “Why did that idiot shoot at us?”

Joe said, “Meth. We’re drowning in it in rural Wyoming. Everyplace is.”

Coon pushed himself up and away from the pickup. “I nearly forgot. There’s something I need you two to look at. Come on, follow me.”

“Me, too?” Sheridan asked.

Coon said, “Especially you.”

 

 

 

COON OPENED THE
passenger hatch of the helicopter and dug out his briefcase from under a seat. He unlatched it to reveal thick files and a sturdy government laptop. As he booted up the computer, he said, “I barely got a chance to see this before we took off. I downloaded it from the Carbon County sheriff’s department. From Rawlins, to be exact.”

“What happened in Rawlins?” Joe asked.

“A pharmacy got robbed and the pharmacist was killed in the robbery. We’re not sure what the bad guys took, but we’re guessing it was cash and drugs. The sheriff’s office is doing an inventory. The store had a closed-circuit camera, and they recovered the digital file. The quality’s not so good and the angle kind of sucks, but you can see the crime going down. The sheriff sent it to us to see if we could help identify the assailants.”

Joe and Sheridan exchanged looks, thinking:
“na. but he hurt some man 2day in a drug store.”

The static image was in black-and-white and it showed four empty aisles stocked with packaging.

“From what I understand,” Coon said, “the camera is mounted on the ceiling behind the pharmacy counter. The view is basically what the pharmacist sees when he looks out into the store. As you can see, the store’s deserted.”

Joe felt Sheridan’s hand find his. He didn’t look down to draw Coon’s attention away.

“Okay, here,” Coon said, pointing at the screen, which showed a tall man with thick wavy hair entering the store and milling in the aisles. The man looked to be in his early to mid-thirties. Despite the poor quality of the transmission, Joe could see the man was fairly good-looking, with a prominent jaw and straight nose. He looked to Joe like an actor or an anchorman. The man was studying everything on the shelves with great interest, which struck Joe as discordant. No one was that interested in
every single item
on the shelves. His behavior was suspicious. Although there was no audio, it was obvious that someone—no doubt the pharmacist, who was out of view—asked the man a question because the man looked up with wide eyes and mouthed, “No.”

Then the man turned and walked swiftly down the aisle and back out the door. The exchange between the pharmacist and the shopper was brief and odd, Joe thought. He said, “We ought to have Cyndi take a look at this. She might recognize that guy. My guess is he’s Robert.”

Coon nodded and reached for the laptop. “Okay, we will in a minute. But we’re pretty sure it’s Robert Stenson. The bureau has a few photos of him and we’ve got agents looking for more. But just a second while I advance this. See if you recognize someone else . . .”

Joe felt Sheridan squeeze his hand.

The door in the store opened again and a second figure came in wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up and cinched tight. There was enough shape to the profile to determine it was a thin female. A strand of light hair crept out from the hood, but because she kept her head down, her face couldn’t be seen.

Joe watched transfixed as the girl dropped items into a shopping basket.

“She looks like she’s really shopping,” Joe said. “She’s picking things out. It doesn’t look random.”

“I didn’t think of that,” Coon said. “Do you recognize her?”

“Not yet. I can’t see her face.”

“Sheridan?” Coon asked.

“She could be somebody,” Sheridan said. “But I can’t tell for sure yet.”

Said Coon, “Keep watching.”

The girl went from one aisle to the next, dropping more items in the shopping basket. One package was large, flat, and square, the kind of packaging used for electronics.

Joe said, “I think that’s a TracFone.”

Coon stopped the tape and tried to zoom in on the package in the girl’s hand. He couldn’t get the controls to work. “We need to examine this on our hardware in Cheyenne,” he said. “I don’t know how to look closer. But if she’s got a new phone, everything we’ve got goes out the window. We can’t find her again unless she calls or sends a text to your daughter.”

Joe grunted. Sheridan looked at her cell phone as if willing it to ring.

Coon gave up trying to zoom in on the package and let the tape roll. The girl got closer to the camera, to the counter. She flinched and Joe guessed the pharmacist had addressed her. She turned, and for a second she raised her head and he could get a glimpse of half of her face. The other half was still hidden in the hood.

What he could see: her face was angular, smooth, pale, and there was a slightly Oriental cast to her eye, which was widened in alarm.

He couldn’t be sure.

Joe said to Sheridan, “Is that
her
?”

“I can’t tell,” Sheridan said quickly.

“Want to look again?” Coon asked. “It’s the best shot we’ve got of her face on here.”

Joe asked why. Coon said, “Watch.”

Two things happened at once on the tape. A white-sleeved arm reached out from the bottom of the frame and grasped the girl by the arm and pulled her closer. Unfortunately, it was too close to the camera for the lens to focus. All that could be seen was the top of her hood, which was dark and blurred. She appeared to be struggling. At the same time in the background, Robert threw open the door and strode toward the camera. His face was a snarling mask. He bent into the girl and out of view and emerged a second later with a gun in his fist. He pointed it below the eye of the camera and it bucked three times.