C. J. Box
Free Fire
PART ONE
YELLOWSTONE ACT, 1872
AN ACT TO SET APART A CERTAIN TRACT OF
LAND LYING NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE
YELLOWSTONE RIVER AS A PUBLIC PARK
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. . is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a publicpark or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people; and all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same, or any part thereof, except as hereinafter provided,shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom. (U.S.C., title 16, sec. 21.)
1
Bechler River Ranger Station Yellowstone National Park July 21
A half-hour after clay mccann walked into the backwoods ranger station and turned over his still-warm weapons, after he’d announced to the startled seasonal ranger behind the desk that he’d just slaughtered four campers near Robinson Lake, the nervous ranger said, “Law enforcement will be here any minute. Do you want to call a lawyer?”
McCann looked up from where he was sitting on a rough-hewnbench. The seasonal ranger saw a big man, a soft man with a sunburn already blooming on his freckled cheeks from just that morning, wearing ill-fitting, brand- new outdoor clothes that still bore folds from the packaging, his blood-flecked hands curled in his lap like he wanted nothing to do with them.
McCann said, “You don’t understand. I
Then he smiled, as if sharing a joke.
2
Saddlestring, Wyoming
Joe pickett was fixing a barbed-wire fence on a boulder-strewn hillside on the southwest corner of the LongbrakeRanch when the white jet cleared the mountaintop and halved the cloudless pale blue sky. He winced as the roar of the engines washed over him and seemed to suck out all sound and complexity from the cold mid- morning, leaving a vacuum in the pummeled silence. Maxine, Joe’s old Labrador, looked at the sky from her pool of shade next to the pickup.
Bud Longbrake Jr. hated silence and filled it immediately. “Damn! I wonder where that plane is headed? It sure is flying low.” Then he began to sing, poorly, a Bruce Cockburn song from the eighties:
“Bet he’s headed for the airport,” Bud Jr. said, abruptly stopping his song in mid-lyric. “What kind of plane was it, anyway?It wasn’t a commercial plane, that’s for sure. I didn’t see anything painted on the side. Man, it sure came out of nowhere.”
Joe set the staple, tightened the wire, pounded it in with three hard blows. He tested the tightness of the wire by strummingit with his gloved fingers.
“It sings better than you,” Joe said, and bent down to the middlestrand, waiting for Bud Jr. to unhook the tightener and move it down as well. After a few moments of waiting, Joe looked up to see that Bud Jr. was still watching the vapor trail of the jet. Bud Jr. looked at his wristwatch. “Isn’t it about time for a coffee break?”
“We just got here,” Joe said. They’d driven two hours across the Longbrake Ranch on a two-track to resume fixing the fence where they’d left it the evening before, when they knocked off early because Bud Jr. complained of “excruciatingback spasms.” Bud Jr. had spent dinner lobbying his father for a Jacuzzi.
Joe stood up straight but didn’t look at his companion. There was nothing about Bud Jr. he needed to see, nothing he wasn’t familiar with after spending three weeks working with him on the ranch. Bud Jr. was thin, tall, stylishly stubble-faced, with sallow blue eyes and a beaded curtain of black hair that fell down over them. Prior to returning to the ranch as a condition of his parole for selling crystal methamphetamine to fellow street performers in Missoula, he’d been a nine-year student at the University of Montana, majoring in just about every one of the liberal arts but finding none of them as satisfying as pantomimeon Higgins Street for spare change. When he showed up back at the Longbrake Ranch where he was raised, Bud Sr. had taken Joe aside and asked Joe to “show my son what it means to work hard. That’s something he never picked up. And don’t call him Shamazz, that’s a name he made up. We need to break him of that. His real name is Bud, just like mine.”
So instead of looking at Bud Jr., Joe surveyed the expanse of ranchland laid out below the hill. Since he’d been fired from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department four months before and lost their state-owned home and headquarters, Joe Pickett was now the foreman of his father-in-law’s ranch-fifteen thousand acres of high grassy desert, wooded Bighorn Mountain foothills, and Twelve Sleep River valley. Although housing and meals were part of his compensation-his family lived in a 110-year-oldlog home near the ranch house-he would clear no more than $20,000 for the year, which made his old state salary look good in retrospect. His mother-in-law, Missy Vankueren- Longbrake,came with the deal.
It was the first October in sixteen years Joe was not in the field during hunting season, on horseback or in his green Game and Fish pickup, among the hunting camps and hunters within the fifteen hundred-square-mile district he had patrolled. Joe was weeks away from his fortieth birthday. His oldest daughter, Sheridan, was in her first year of high school and talking about college. His wife’s business management firm was thriving, and she outearned him four to one. He had traded his weapons for fencing tools, his red uniform shirt for a Carhartt barn coat, his badge for a shovel, his pickup for a ’99 Ford flatbed with LONGBRAKERANCHES painted on the door, his hard-earned authority and reputation for three weeks of overseeing a twenty-seven-year-old meth dealer who wanted to be known as Shamazz.
All because of a man named Randy Pope, the director of the Game and Fish Department, who had schemed for a year lookingfor a reason to fire him. Which Joe had provided.
When asked by Marybeth two nights ago how he felt, Joe had said he was perfectly happy.
“Which means,” she responded, “that you’re perfectly miserable.”
Joe refused to concede that, wishing she didn’t know him better than he knew himself.
But no one could ever say he didn’t work hard.
“Unhook that stretcher and move it down a strand,” Joe told Bud Jr.
