Ron Connelly nervously raked his fingers through his long hair and chinned toward Joe and the deputy. “Those rednecks out there want blood and there’s just the two of you between them and us.”
“Yup,” Joe said. “And if it were up to me, I’d step aside.”
Ron’s face twitched. He didn’t know if Joe was kidding or not. Joe didn’t, either. He disliked Connelly more every minute he was exposed to him. What kind of man shot an eagle on the ground? Or Tube?
“I’ll up my offer to stay here tonight,” Brad said.
Brokaw finished the page he was working on, looked to Joe, said,
Ron Connelly ran in terror to the back of the cell. Brad shrieked.
“Just kidding,” the deputy said, standing up and stifling a smile. “I’ll go outside and talk to ’em.”
Joe watched with admiration as the deputy stepped outside with a shotgun and told everyone to calm down and go home. When a man shouted that the Mad Archer should be released to them, the deputy racked the pump on his shotgun, said, “Go ahead, boys, I got nothing to lose. I don’t like this job much, anyhow.”
The crowd dispersed, and the deputy came back in, sighed,
“Impressive,” Joe said.
“I learned in Basra that there is no sound in nature that makes men move along faster than the pumping of a shotgun. Except maybe a chainsaw, but we won’t go there.”
SIMULTANEOUS WITH the snap of the jail door on Ron and Brad, Joe opened his phone and speed-dialed Marybeth.
She was anxious. Someone claiming to be April had called their old house.
It took a moment to register. His stomach did a half-turn. Ron, Brad, the deputy, Baggs all faded from his consciousness. “Is this a sick joke?”
“I wish I could say for sure.”
“Impossible,” Joe said.
“Of course it’s impossible,” she said. But there was a hesitation—an opening he could sense that maybe she thought it
“We paid for her funeral. We were
“There was never an autopsy.”
“There was no need. I
“You saw her before. You didn’t see her after. None of us did.”
“Impossible,” he said again.
“All I can say is someone called our old house and asked to speak to Sheridan and Lucy. And whoever called identified herself as April and now has Sheridan’s cell phone number.”
“This is the sickest joke anyone’s ever played on us.”
“It’s depraved,” she said. “But Jason said the girl asked for ‘Sherry.’ No one has ever called Sheridan that except Lucy and April.”
He waited a moment, said, “Tell Sheridan not to shut her phone off tonight.”
“She’s a teenager, Joe. She never shuts off her phone.”
He tapped out an e-mail to his district supervisor advising him of his decision to take immediate personal time, knowing it wouldn’t be received until the next day when he was already gone. Being the governor’s unofficial point man had its privileges. He snapped the phone shut.
The deputy was looking at him. “You okay?”
“Not really.”
“Did somebody die?”
Joe said, “Just the opposite.”
HE DROVE NORTH on lonely state highway 789, where his headlights illuminated sudden herds of mule deer and pronghorn antelope along the road. The adrenaline rush that had surged through him during the arrest and arraignment of the Mad Archer was starting to wear off and a small headache, like a marble-sized ball of black, formed behind his right eye. Wildlife was everywhere, and they all seemed to be restless, on the move, as if anticipating full-fledged hunting season in two weeks. He had to slow down and stay alert. The night sky was clear and missing a moon and the only lights for the first fifty-one miles were the vertical twinkles from distant natural gas wells. Tube was in the front seat with his head on Joe’s lap, where he dreamed and drooled. The eagle was still lashed to the inside wall of his pickup bed with the sock on her head. He felt like he was piloting a traveling freak show in search of rubes who would pay admission.
Maxine, his Labrador who had once been scared white by something she saw in the timber, had passed on the previous winter. Her passing had been traumatic but also a relief of sorts because the old girl went deaf and blind in a remarkable hurry and suffered briefly from the liver condition that took her life. He’d buried her in a howling windstorm in the breaklands she loved, with Sheridan reading a eulogy that was whipped away by the wind. Her loss left a hole in their family that would likely never be filled. Tube might ease some of the pain, he hoped. If nothing else, it was impossible to look at the dog and not smile.
ON THE LONG top-of-the-world drive over the Shirley Mountains in darkness so complete that at times he felt he was in an outdoor tunnel, Joe recalled the incidents of six years before, where they’d lost April in the snow on Battle Mountain.
The Keeley family of Mississippi had played a significant and tragic role in Joe and Marybeth’s lives. Ote Keeley, the outfitter father, had turned up dead on Joe’s woodpile nine years before. Joe had interviewed his wife, Jeannie, as part of the investigation, and while he was talking with her was the first time he saw April, who was dirty, sick, poorly clothed, and six years old at the time. When Jeannie abandoned April, Marybeth swooped in and took the girl
