Out of Range (28 page)

She smiled. “I believe that. Do you want to leave?”

It took him a moment to respond. “No.”

“I don’t want you to leave either.”

He took another sip, looking at her over the top of his cup, trying to convince himself that what he was doing was part of his investigation.

“You’ve never met a woman like me,” she said softly. He watched her lips, saw a flash of white teeth when she spoke.

“You’re right.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, cutting the words off, as if she’d planned to say more.

“I found Will’s last notebook,” he said.

“In the state cabin?”

He nodded.

“I looked for it afterward,” she said wistfully, breaking their gaze. “I’d hoped he brought it down with him. Where was it—under the mattress?”

“Yes. I saw your initial in the guest book. I recognized it from the invitation you sent.”

She smiled, and her eyes filmed over, as if remembering something that touched her. It wasn’t guilt, he thought.

“I wanted to leave some kind of record,” she said. “In case something happened to me. Or to both of us. You know that outfitter Smoke Van Horn? The one you shot? He saw us together up there. He didn’t approve.”

“I know.”

“He was the least of our worries, though. He didn’t realize I was trying to save Will.”

“Were you?”

“Obviously I didn’t do a very good job of it.”

Joe started to speak when Ed slid a big platter in front of him and handed Stella her bagel on a plate.

“These are on the house,” Ed said. “Enjoy!”

Joe looked up. “What’s the occasion?”

“This is my last day of business here,” Ed said, his eyes betraying his beaming mouthonly smile. “Jackson has plumb outgrown me.”

“Damn,” Joe said.

“I’d have done the same for Smoke,” Ed said. “He was a good customer too.

“See that up there on the shelf ?” Ed gestured to a garishly painted ceramic lion’s head. “That was in honor of Smoke, the Lion of the Tetons. Some of his hunters presented it to him at breakfast once, and he forgot it when he left. I put it up there and it’s been there ever since. He always said he wanted it back, but he never took it with him.”

Joe could feel Stella’s eyes on him, watching his reaction.

“It’s a shame,” Ed said.

“You mean Smoke? Or your last day of business?” Joe asked.

Ed turned back toward the kitchen. “Both, I guess,” he said over his shoulder.

Joe and Stella talked long after the dishes were cleared. He had drunk so much coffee he felt jittery. She asked him about what had happened at the cabin, and he recounted it all. She seemed fascinated by the story, but focused in on what he was thinking at the time, and how he felt after, not the details of the shooting. He was again taken by how comfortable he was with her, how easy she was to talk with. He wondered if Will had felt the same way. Then he answered his own question: of course he did. He’d said as much in his notebook.

“I don’t know what to say,” Joe said. “I’m talked out.”

“I think you do,” she said. “You’re just scared of the words.”

He looked up at her.

“Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you can’t care for another just as much. It’s about context. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. You can have both.”

Joe felt his eyes grow wide, and squinted them back. He felt the ZING.

“I don’t know,” he stammered.

“I’m safe,” she said, leaning across the table toward him.

“You will never meet a woman as safe as I am. I have no agenda, and I don’t want either of us to get hurt. But I want to be with you, Joe, if only for a little while. As long as it’s real, and as honest as we can make it.”

“What about Don?” Joe asked, not even believing he had asked.

“Don’t ruin the mood,” she said abruptly. “Don thinks of me as part of him. And since Don is obsessed with the very idea and concept of Don Ennis, well . . .”

Ed appeared with the pot of coffee. Joe didn’t know whether to embrace him or send him away.

“What is it you’re trying to find out here?” he asked, looking out the window.

She was quiet for a few moments. Then: “I told you. I’m looking for authenticity. Genteel authenticity. All my life I’ve been surrounded by people who pose, who play a role. For the first twentyfive years of my life, I didn’t know the difference between actors and the real people they based their performances on. I’m sick of the interpretation. I want to go to the source.”

“And you think you’ll find it here?”

She laughed, tossed her head back. “Not in Jackson, no.

But yes, I think I’ll find it out here. I think I’m getting real close right now.”

Joe felt his face get hot. He wondered what kind of authenticity Stella thought she could find in a married man.

How could it be authentic if lying was integral to the relationship? But he couldn’t say it.

“We’re the last people left in here,” Joe said, looking around. “I should get going.”

“And do what?”

He thought about it. “I’ve got some things I need to check out.”

She narrowed her eyes, trying to read him.

“Look,” he said, “I’m not sure why I trust you, but I do.

Maybe it’s because Will did. You’ve got to answer a question.”

He saw a flash of fear in her dark eyes. What did she think he was going to ask?

“When you went up to the state cabin with Will, did he seem to get better? His mental state, I mean?”

“At first, yes,” she said. Was that relief he noticed in her face? “The first day up there he said he felt like himself again. He loved Two Ocean Pass, and said he wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his days there.”

“He is,” Joe said, “but go on.”

She hesitated a moment before continuing. “By the second day, though, he was in bad shape again. He’d have terrible headaches, and he couldn’t eat. His hands shook. I tried to help him, you know, keep him distracted. But he was too far gone. He was really depressed when we rode back down. That was a week before, you know . . .”

Joe nodded, thinking.

“What?” she asked.

“This morning Dr. Thompson gave me a little lecture about taking care of myself. He said I had drugs in my system.”

Stella looked at Joe, puzzled.

“He said it was barbiturates. He said even though I’d taken the stuff days before, there were still traces in my blood. He asked me about Valium and Xanax, and warned me that both have some serious side effects.”

She listened intently, watching him, something going on behind her eyes.

“Stella, I’ve never taken drugs in my life. Somehow, they were introduced. It must have happened before I went up into the Thorofare. I haven’t really felt normal since I got here, so now I’m guessing this has been going on for a while.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I think the same thing happened to Will. Maybe somebody got to him, figured out a way to drug him. He was under a lot of pressure, and if he didn’t know he was being drugged it would have made it worse for him, made him think he was going crazy. It was just a matter of time before he did something horrible.”

She looked stricken, her face drained of color. She knew something, but he didn’t know what.

“You’re coming to our party tonight, aren’t you?” she asked suddenly.

Joe sat back. “I hadn’t thought of it. I forgot about it, to be honest with you. I never RSVP’d.”

“You need to come,” she said, reaching across the table and grasping his hand.

“Why? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I’m good at.”

“It’s important to me that you come,” she said, her eyes burning into his. “It’s essential. I’ll make sure you’re on the guest list. The Secret Service wants a guest list by noon.”

“Stella . . .”

“What you just told me opens everything up,” she said.

“It’s like a light just went on. But I need to think about it, and make sure I’m on the right track.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Come tonight,” she said, grabbing her jacket and sliding out of the booth. “Everything will come together tonight. We’ll have everybody we need in one room.”

He didn’t know what to make of that. He wanted to believe she was on his side, on Will’s side. That she was going to help solve the puzzle of Will’s death, but in her own way.

She seemed to confirm it when she strode around the table and bent down and kissed him full on the mouth. Her lips were warm and soft, and he could still taste them as she walked out of the Sportsman’s Café without looking back.

It took a moment for Joe to get his wits back and stand up. When he did, he saw Ed looking at him over the top of the batwing doors.

“Don’t say it,” Joe said. Dark thunderheads of guilt had already begun rolling across his sky.

“Just like Will,” Ed said anyway.

Thirty Two

At least once a day he takes his birds out,” Bello said, while driving. “He lets them fly around and he puts food out for them or holds it in his hand. The birds drop out of the sky to eat it.”

“He’s training the birds to hunt with him,” Barnum said. “It’s called stooping.”

“I don’t care what it’s called,” Bello said testily. “I just care that he does it once a day, usually in the afternoon.”

The exsheriff felt a rise of anger but said nothing. Bello shouldn’t talk like that to him, he thought. He was getting sick of the lack of respect people showed him, Bello included.

“Like I told you,” Bello said, swinging his SUV off the state highway onto the twotrack that led to the stone house and the river, “before we actually get to his place the road goes up over a rise. It’s about three hundred yards from the house. He can’t see a vehicle approaching until it comes over the top. When I was scouting him, that’s where I put the sandbags, up there on that rise behind some sagebrush. He never looked in my direction. The sandbags are about a hundred yards apart, so we’ll have sight lines from two angles.”

“What if he hears us coming?” Barnum asked. “The noise of a car carries a long way out here.”

“That’s why we walk the last mile to the rise,” Bello said tersely. “I’m guessing your old legs can handle that.”

“Fuck you, Bello,” Barnum said, not fighting his anger this time.

Bello laughed dryly. “That’s the spirit, Sheriff.”

Their rifles were between them on the seats, muzzles down. Bello’s .300 Winchester Mag had a satin finish and an oversized Leupold scope. Barnum’s old .270 looked like a hillbilly gun beside it, Bello said when he saw it.

“Forty elk and a drunken Mexican with a shovel would disagree,” Barnum shot back.

Bello had told him the story almost casually the night before, as they sat on opposite sides of Bello’s room at the Holiday Inn. Both had cocktails in hand that Barnum had mixed.

Nate Romanowski had been known by a code name, the Falcon, and was one of the best the agency had, Bello said. He was out of the country for years at a time. But like others who were too tightly wound and too independent, Romanowski had started to choose which orders to follow and which ones to disregard. When he was called back to headquarters, it took three months for him to show up, and he clashed immediately with the new director. The Falcon quit loudly, in agency terms, intimating he would talk if they tried to stop him. “You’ve never seen paranoia like the paranoia we had in our outfit,” Bello said, showing his teeth.

Two operatives, one a friend of Randan Bello and the other his soninlaw, were sent to find the Falcon and assure themselves, and the agency, that he had no intention of talking after all. The operatives took annual leave to do it, so the agency couldn’t be accused of official covert activity within the country. Their last dispatch was from northern Montana, via email, reporting that they had heard about a loner who fit the profile of the Falcon. The suspect was a falconer who drove an old Jeep and packed a .454 Casull from Freedom Arms in Wyoming. The next day, the bodies of the operatives were discovered by a passing motorist, who reported the accident to the Montana State Patrol.

“Romanowski killed them both?” Barnum asked. “Why didn’t we hear anything about it?”

Bello drained his glass of scotch and held it out for a refill.

“The inquiry concluded that the engine on their vehicle quit on a switchback road and they lost control and rolled eight times. Both were crushed.”

Barnum looked over his shoulder as he poured. “You’re pretty sure he did it though.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Sure enough that the day after I retired I headed out here to Wyoming,” Bello said. “My daughter has never remarried.”

“Kids?”

“Nope. I’ve got no grandkids.”

Barnum thought of his own grandchildren, teenage darkskinned delinquents on the reservation he had never even met. No great loss, he thought.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Barnum asked, finally.

“Because you asked,” Bello said, drinking and looking out the window. “And you offered to help.”

Barnum hadn’t believed him at the time—Bello’s explanation just hadn’t sounded right. Nevertheless, he had gone along, because he had reasons of his own.

Bello pulled off the twotrack more than a mile from the rise and turned off the engine. Climbing out, he pocketed the keys, slung the .300 over his shoulder, and buckled on a large fanny pack. Barnum followed suit, sliding his .270

out of the truck. He loaded it with 150 grain shells and worked the bolt.

“Are you ready?” Bello asked in a low voice.

Barnum nodded, and they shut the car doors softly.

There was a slight breeze coming from the direction of the river, which was good because it made it even more unlikely that their car had been heard.

Bello walked around the SUV and handed Barnum a small Motorola Talkabout set to channel four.