Below Zero

For the first time in his life, Joe felt mildly famous. It was similar to a headache.

GOVERNOR SPENCER RULON was on the telephone. He cringed a greeting and waved Joe into a deep red leather chair. Joe removed his hat, put it crown-down in his lap, and waited.

Rulon was a big man in every way, with a round face like a hubcap, an untamed shock of silver-flecked brown hair, and eyes like brown laser pointers when he fixed them on a person or an object. He had the liquid grace big men had, and his movements were impatient, swift, and energetic. If the recent scandal allegations had affected him physically, Joe couldn’t see it.

The last time Joe had been in the governor’s office, Stella Ennis, Rulon’s chief of staff, had been there along with the head of the state DCI. Tony Portenson of the FBI had also been present, and Rulon had successfully browbeaten him into releasing Nate Romanowski on Joe’s request. That had not gone well.

Rulon was in the last year of his first term and he was running again. What should have been a walkover had turned into a race, primarily due to the Stella Ennis and Nate Romanowski scandals. His natural enemies were flush with newfound excitement and confidence, like journeymen boxers who had been beaten round after round but somehow landed a lucky punch that sent the champ reeling.

His opponent was Forrest Niffin, a Central Wyoming rancher with a handlebar mustache, who was mounted on a white horse in all of his campaign posters. Despite his rustic image, the challenger was a multimillionaire who had recently moved to Wyoming from upstate New York, where he’d founded a fashion empire. Oddly, Rulon had a framed photo of the challenger on his bookshelf behind his head.

Despite Rulon’s eccentric and mercurial ways, like challenging the senate majority leader to a shooting contest to decide a bill or sending Joe on assignments “without portfolio” to maintain deniability, Joe knew that the governor had saved him and pulled him out of the bureaucratic netherworld. He owed him his job and his family’s welfare.

“I understand,” the governor said into the phone, “but if you permit one more well before your lawyers and my lawyers have a sit-down, I’m gonna sue your ass. That’s right. And I’m going to call a press conference out in some scenic spot in the mountains to announce the suit so every photo has that pristine view behind me.”

Joe could hear the caller say, “You’re out of your mind.”

Rulon nodded and waggled his eyebrows at Joe while he said into the phone, “That’s pretty much the conclusion around here.”

Smiling wolfishly, Rulon hit the speaker button on his phone and leaned back in his chair.

“You can’t threaten me,” the caller said. Joe thought the voice was vaguely familiar.

“I just did.”

“Look, can’t we discuss this more reasonably?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Rulon said, grasping the phone set with both hands, pleading into it. “That’s what I proposed.”

Joe could hear the man sighing on the other end. “Okay. I’ll have our legal guys call your people tomorrow.”

“Lovely. Good-bye, Mr. Secretary.”

Rulon punched off. Joe felt his scalp twitch.

“The secretary of the interior?” Joe asked.

Rulon nodded. In the west, the secretary of the interior was more important than whoever the president might be. And Rulon had just threatened to “sue his ass.”

“Empty suit,” Rulon declared.

Joe was confused. Did the governor mean the threatened legal action or the secretary himself?

“Both,” Rulon said, reading Joe’s face. “Now what is the occasion of your extremely rare visit to the very heart of the beast?”

Joe knew Rulon didn’t like formalities or rhetoric, and Joe wasn’t adept at either one anyway: “I want a leave of absence to pursue a case on my own. I might be in Wyoming, but I might also need to cross state lines. And this is the thing: I might need to call on you or the DCI for help at some point.”

Rulon leveled his gaze. “You know how much trouble you got me in letting Romanowski go?”

“Yes,” Joe said. “I want to thank you for sticking your neck out for me last year. I know you didn’t have to do that. I’m sorry about the heat you’ve taken.”

Rulon said, “Goes with the territory. I’ll survive. What can they do? Take my birthday away from me?” He gestured behind him at the photograph. “The people of Wyoming are smart. They’ll flirt with that knucklehead Niffin at first, but they’ll come to their senses.”

“I hope so,” Joe said.

“Besides, the Romanowski thing was peanuts compared to what Niffin’s operatives are saying about me and Stella Ennis.” Rulon probed Joe’s face, making him uncomfortable. Joe had known Stella two years before she showed up as the governor’s chief of staff. He knew what kind of power she had over men. He doubted Mrs. Rulon would be so understanding.

Rulon said, “Nothing happened. And the stuff they’re saying—that’s not how we do politics in Wyoming.”

Joe nodded.

“It could have. Hell, it should have. But it didn’t.”

“Okay.”

“She left on her own accord.”

“Okay,” Joe said, squirming. He wasn’t sure why Rulon felt the need to confess to him.