“Keep the volume all the way down,” Bello said. “If you need to talk to me about something, hit the chirp key and then turn the volume up a quarter of the way. But I hope we don’t need to talk.”
Barnum clipped the radio to his shirt pocket.
“Remember the plan?” Bello asked.
“No, I forgot it,” Barnum said gruffly, being sarcastic.
Bello’s eyes bored into the exsheriff. “Strange time for jokes.”
“When we have a visual,” Barnum said, using the same words Bello had used earlier, “we signal each other by waving our hands, palms out. Then we both sight him in and when you give the signal, a double chirp from the radio, we fire at the same time so we increase our chances of knocking him down for good.”
“Aim for his chest,” Bello said, interrupting, “with the crosshairs on the middle of the widest part of him. Forget about taking a head shot at this distance.”
“When he’s down,” Barnum continued, stepping on Bello’s words, “we wait an hour, keeping the body in the scope and checking for movement. If we don’t see any, you’ll go down and drag him into the river. I’ll stay back and keep watch down the road.”
Bello listened intently, his eyes on Barnum, making sure the exsheriff had everything correct. Barnum didn’t like being looked at that way, and didn’t make a secret of it in his rehearsed delivery.
“Okay, then,” Bello said, turning and walking down the middle of the twotrack. Barnum followed.
There were problems with Bello’s plan, Barnum thought.
He’d reviewed it the night before, turning it over again and again, and finally figured out what was wrong with it: He was being set up. When Bello double chirped and Barnum fired, Bello would deliberately miss, so the only slug to be found in Romanowski’s body would be the .270 round.
Everyone knew Barnum hunted with a .270, and a ballistics check would tie the slug to the rifle.
Barnum was well known as a drinker and a talker, and the whole town was aware of his humiliation at the Stockman’s. If Romanowski’s body was found, and it would no doubt wash up somewhere downriver, Barnum would be a suspect.
By then, Bello would be long gone.
Of course, Barnum would implicate Bello. But, Barnum had realized, what did he really know about the man from Virginia? Was his name even Randan Bello? Barnum had never seen an ID. Was he even from Virginia, or were those stolen or counterfeit plates on his car? The man had been meticulous since arriving about leaving no records by paying for everything with cash. He had spilled everything out to Barnum so easily about the agency, and his soninlaw, and his intentions. Bello didn’t seem like the kind of man to expose himself that way. The only reason he had done so, Barnum concluded, was because he saw in the exsheriff a way to pin the murder on someone else.
But that wasn’t going to happen, Barnum said to himself while he walked. When that double chirp came, the exsheriff was going to swing his rifle around and shoot Bello in the head.
That would give the morning men at the BurgOPardner something to talk about.
“I went to the sheriff with my concerns,” Barnum would say, widening his hounddog eyes, looking at each com
munity leader in turn, “but he practically threw me out of his office. So I had to take care of things myself.”
“Sounds like we need a new sheriff,” someone would say, should say, perhaps the mayor. And they would all look to him.
“I don’t know, fellows,” Barnum would say humbly. “I was just getting used to being retired.”
Bello stopped and gestured at the sky. Barnum squinted, seeing the black speck of a falcon streaking across a pillowy cumulous cloud.
“His birds are out, which means he’s in the open,” Bello whispered over his shoulder, his back to Barnum. “This will work perfectly.”
“Yup,” the exsheriff said absently, seeing something in his peripheral vision. He turned, and learned he could actually see a bullet coming when it was aimed straight at his head from a quarter of a mile away, even before he could hear the shot.
Par t Five A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Thirty Three
They’re getting to me somehow, Will Jensen wrote on the last page of his notebook. They’re inside my head and inside my body. They know where I’m going and they track my movements. I know it sounds crazy, and it IS crazy. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so. They figured out a way to screw me up.
Joe sat at the table in the statehouse and reread the last few pages of the notebook again. He wished Will had been more specific.
Who were “they”? What did he mean “they” were inside his head? If Will was right, how could “they” track his movements, as he claimed?
Then he read the next passage, the one that had chilled him in the cabin:
There is something so wrong with me. I’m not alone anymore. There is somebody inside my head. I’ve lost everything and my mind is next to go. Maybe it already has. I do things as if someone else were doing them. I watch myself say and do things, I know 262
it’s my body, but it isn’t me. Dear God, will you help me? Will anyone? Nobody else will except Stella.
