You said it yourself, Joe.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t help,” he said. Her inference stung.
“But he doesn’t want your help,” she said, frustration showing. “He wants you to go with us and watch over this family. That’s what he admires about you, Joe. You’re not like him.”
Joe smiled bitterly. “I’ve got to see this through,” he said.
Marybeth reached out to him and cupped her hands around his face and took a long moment. Then she said, “It won’t do me any good to argue, will it?”
“Nope.”
“If you get yourself hurt or killed…” She didn’t finish the thought. There was no point.
Joe said, “I’ll see you in California in a day or so. We can use a vacation we can’t afford.”
She smiled, but there were tears in her eyes.
He said, “Go into the bathroom and compose yourself, honey. We don’t want the girls to see you crying. I’ll go say goodbye to them and tell them something came up.”
She nodded, then kissed him on the cheek.
“I’ll be careful,” he said. But he wasn’t sure what he meant.
From inside Marybeth’s van, Joe watched his wife and daughters troop across the tarmac toward the waiting plane. Rowdy Jones followed them. At the base of the accordion stairs, Marybeth turned and gave him a little wave.
He waved back but wasn’t sure she could see him.
When the airplane was in the sky and its wings tipped and it banked to the south toward Denver, he started up the van. Now that they were safe, the fish tank of his mind got bigger. He could see the individual fish, the individual problems. He began to make a plan.
He had no idea if it was a good one.
29
Although Nate Romanowski had been gone only a week from Twelve Sleep County, it seemed to him as he cruised the untracked morning roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation that he’d been gone forever. He drove by Bad Bob’s, noting that although it was too early to have opened, there was a troubling and vacant feeling about the place, indicating no one was there. Bob’s pickup was parked as always on the side of the building, but it was covered with snow. There was no sign of life from inside the store or Bob’s house behind it.
Same with Alice Thunder’s place. No woodsmoke from the chimney or exhaust fan on the roof. Newspapers, both the Saddlestring Roundup and the even smaller reservation weekly, gathered on the front porch sheathed in translucent orange tubes.
“She’s gone, and she’s been for a week or so,” Nate said. “Good.”
“Who’s gone?” Haley asked, following his gaze toward the small frame house.
“Someone I care about,” Nate said. “Everybody I was in contact with is in danger. That’s why I warned them to get away.”
Haley didn’t respond but seemed to be looking inward, thinking. He didn’t ask about what.
Nate cruised up Bighorn Road fifteen minutes later. As he did he checked his mirrors repeatedly and slowed down on the crest of each hill before descending. His weapon was on his lap.
He nodded as he drove by Joe Pickett’s house. Joe’s Game and Fish pickup was parked on the side of the garage, also blanketed with a thin coat of snow. A set of tracks emerged from beneath the garage door: Marybeth’s van. They were gone.
“For once,” Nate said, “Joe seems to have listened to me when I told him something.”
“He’s gone?” Haley asked.
“Looks like it. They’ve got kids, and the place would have been a beehive this time in the morning before school.”
He stopped at Joe’s mailbox a quarter-mile from the house and placed an object inside. When Haley gave him a quizzical look, he said simply, “I want him to know I was here.”
“Okay,” he said, swinging off the pavement onto a rough two-track directly away from the Pickett house, “the field has been cleared and the operation is under way.”
He could feel Haley’s eyes on him as he drove toward the base of Wolf Mountain. They crashed through a thick set of willows where the branches scraped both doors and emerged in a small white alcove. There was brush on all four sides of them, no way to see out, and no way to see in from the road.
He looked sternly at her and killed the engine. “Come on,” he said.
Unexpected fear flashed in her eyes. She hesitated for a moment, then climbed out.
He chinned for her to move to the front of the Jeep, and when she did he raised the. 500, then spun it with his index finger through the trigger guard and rotated it so the muzzle was pointed at his chest and the grip was offered to her.
“Take it,” he said.
“Why?”
“Just take it,” he said more gently.
She did. He stepped back three steps, his boots crunching in the light snow.
He said, “If you’re going to kill me, I want you to do it now.”
She stood there, uncomprehending, her eyes puzzled.
“In an hour or so, I’m going after John Nemecek,” Nate said. “I’m going to hit him hard and fast and right in his face. The tactic is speed, surprise, and overwhelming violence. You don’t have to participate, and I may not want you involved. But Haley, if you’re going to bushwhack me, or try to warn him, I want you to do it now. Aim and fire. Blow a hole in me no one could recover from. Do it and get it over with now, not later.”
She held the gun out away from her, pointed vaguely at his waist. But not yet raising it. Their eyes bored into each other’s.
“Why are you testing me like this?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?”
“I’m giving you your chance to be a hero. Do it now, if you’re so inclined. I have no other weapons, and I couldn’t get to you in time to stop a shot. This is your chance.”
“Why, Nate?”
He paused. “I can handle the enemy, and I salute him if he can get the better of me in a fair fight. But I hate betrayal. I need to know one way or the other with you.”
After a few beats, she shook her head and let the weapon drop to her side.
“You know what,” he said, as he took the. 500 from her and fed it back into his holster, “I’ve never done that before. Given my weapon to someone.”
He noticed her hands were trembling and he covered them with his own.
“This might work out,” he said.
“It’s tough when the foundation for your loyalty and beliefs crumbles away while you’re in the building, isn’t it?” he said, as they drove back out through the wall of willows toward the road.
“Yes,” she said.
She told him how Nemecek had found her after she’d enlisted in the Army and had gone through basic. How he’d selected her for the Peregrines and tested her character and strength. He knew her father was a lifer in the military, and that she understood the culture and the sacrifice necessary to ascend to Special Forces. She’d participated in two overseas operations-one in Bosnia, one in Iraq-before Nemecek came to her and explained that he was creating the strike team on the outside and that he had a very special role for her to play.
“He told me that same story about Afghanistan,” she said, “but he reversed the blame, just like you said. There wasn’t a single operator, once they heard what happened, who didn’t want your head. Me included.”
