Free Fire (5 page)

Marybeth said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I can come up with one man. Earl Alden.”

“Ah,” Joe said. They called him the Earl of Lexington. Alden was a Southern multibillionaire media mogul who had recently bought the former Scarlett Ranch. He divided his time between the ranch and three other residences in Lexington, New York City, and Chamonix. The rumor was that Mrs. Alden didn’t like their ranch, and she rarely came with him. The fact that there was a Mrs. Alden had never posed much of a hurdle to Missy before.

“The Earl just gave a couple hundred thousand to the Twelve Sleep County Arts Council,” Marybeth said. “So it’s possible he’ll be at the meeting tonight.”

“Where Missy can begin her charm offensive,” Joe said.

“Exactly.”

Joe said, “How did you turn out so well?”

Marybeth smiled. “My mother wouldn’t agree. She wonders where she went wrong.” Missy made no secret of how she had hoped Marybeth—the smartest of her children—would become a corporate attorney or a U.S. senator, or at least follow her exampleand marry one.

Joe patted himself on the chest. “I was your downfall.”

Marybeth sat back and facetiously looked him over, nodding.“Yes. Marrying you doomed me. Then you made me have our children. Now I’m trapped.”

Joe thought,
She’s kidding but her mother is not
.

Joe told her about the offer from the governor. He gauged her reaction carefully as he laid it out. He noticed that while he spoke, she glanced several times at the file folder in his lap.

When he was through, she hesitated for a beat and said, “Can we trust him?”

“The governor?”

“Yes.”

He wasn’t sure how to answer. He said, “If we can’t trust our governor, who can we trust?”

She rolled her eyes. “I need a glass of wine.”

Joe thought about her question while she was gone. He dug deep. Did he trust Spencer Rulon?

When she came back with two glasses, he said, “No, not completely.”

“The deal as you describe it makes me uncomfortable,” she said. “They either hire you back or they don’t. From what you tell me, you’ll be operating on your own with no backup and no support. If you get into trouble, you’re on your own.
We’re
on our own. What is that phrase politicians like to use?”

“Plausible deniability.”

“Right. And how do we know Randy Pope won’t do everythinghe can to undermine you at every turn?”

“I expect him to do that,” Joe said.

She sighed, sipped her wine. “Remember how frustrated you were with the bureaucracy, with fighting against the system? Do you think you could live within it again—do you think it’s changed at all?”

Joe shook his head. “Not a bit.”

“Do we move back to our house?”

“I don’t think so. He never mentioned it. Would you want that?”

“No, although I wouldn’t mind a change of scenery if that meant we could get our lives back.”

Me too
, he thought.

“The last time you had to leave us it wasn’t very good,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

When he was assigned temporarily to Jackson, Joe thought. No, it wasn’t very good for them. In fact, his absence and the things that happened with both of them had damaged their marriage.It was only now healing. Time and their joint determinationto right the ship had created scar tissue. But the wound was still there, and would always be there, he supposed.

“I’d want you to come this time,” Joe said. “Bring Sheridan and Lucy every chance you get. It’ll be tough with school and activities, but let’s make sure we stay close and in contact.”

She nodded, thinking it over. “I’ve always wanted to go to Yellowstone, as you know.”

“I know.”

“But we’ve never gone.”

Joe sighed, and found himself staring at the woodstove.

“Are you going to be able to do this?” she asked.

He looked back. “I have to.”

Yellowstone, a place so special and awe-inspiring that after exploring it in 1871, the Hayden Expedition conceived of the original concept of the world’s first national park—a set-aside of 2.2 million acres containing more than ten thousand thermal features, canyons, waterfalls, and wildlife—so no man or corporationcould ever own it. As a boy, Joe had been to Yellowstonedozens of times. Many of his earliest memories were of geysers, mud pots, bears, and tourists. He had once loved the park unlike anywhere else, and announced to his parents he wanted to live there, to fish, hike, and camp for the rest of his life. It was a magical place and he had preferred it to heaven becauseat that age Joe didn’t think there could be trout streams in the clouds.

His father shared his love for the park, which was the reason they vacationed there year after year. Their mutual love for it was one of the few things they ever agreed on, other than the movie
Shane
. It was the one place, Joe recalled, where his fathercame alive, stopped drinking, and played at being an amateurgeologist—explaining to his two young sons that there were three kinds of thermal features in the world: geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles (steam vents), and Yellowstone featuredthem all. He remembered his father running down a boardwalk in the Upper Geyser Basin—actually running!— and shouting over his shoulder to his boys to follow him becauseOld Faithful itself was about to erupt. It was a place where one could look into the cruel molten heart of the earth itself, and Joe had once done exactly that. Or thought he had. It was in a huge lung-shaped hot pool, the water vivid aquamarine,steam hovering above the calm surface. A shaft of sunlight plunged deep into the pool, which looked so inviting but was nearly two hundred degrees, illuminating bleached-whitebison bones resting on rock shelves as far down as he could see. Bones! And no bottom to the pool; it simply descendedfar past where the sun could reach. For years, he had nightmares about those bones, about falling into the pool, about sinking slowly as the water got hotter and hotter, his bones coming to rest on an outcropping.

His brother loved it too, but in a different way.

But he couldn’t remember Yellowstone without what came next: the darkest period of his young life.

He’d never been back.

He’d attempted to defeat the demons eight years before, when Sheridan was six and Lucy a baby. Joe had borrowed a tent, and their plan was to spend a week camping in Yellowstone,just as he had done when he was a child. He would cook meals over a campfire, and they’d see the sights: Old Faithful, Mammoth Hot Springs, Norris Geyser Basin, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Lower and Upper Falls. Everythinghad been ahead of them then and nothing seemed daunting.He’d actually looked forward to going back to the park and putting all the bad memories about it behind him for good. But the week before they went, Marybeth discovered she was pregnant,and the early weeks would mean morning sickness and misery. Although she was willing to gut it out, they postponed the trip for later. It was the year they had been assigned the SaddlestringDistrict, a year before violence entered their lives. And never went very far away.

Marybeth was the most practical woman Joe had ever known. She ran the finances for the family, her business, her clients. She could see things clearly. Yet she had not even mentionedthat if he went back to the state—with a raise—their situationwould dramatically improve. That a house in town away from Missy would be within reach.

She looked up and studied his face. He tried not to give his thoughts away. He didn’t succeed.

“You really want to do this, don’t you?”

Joe said nothing.

“You want to get back into it. You want to carry a badge and a gun again, don’t you?”

“I don’t like to be a failure,” he said.

“Stop it. You’re not a failure.”

He let that lie. The last thing he wanted was to make her tell him why he wasn’t a failure. He could counter every argument.

“Joe, what do you want to do?”

There were so many reasons not to accept the offer. Pope. Bureaucracy. The chance, once again, that the evil he encounteredwould affect his family.

But . . .

“Yes, I want to do it.”

“Then it’s settled,” Marybeth said. “Call the governor.”

“I love you,” he said.

She reached out and squeezed his arm. “I love you too, Joe.”

“I don’t know why.”

She laughed, said, “Because you want to do good, even when you should know better.”

When the knock came at her door, Sheridan quickly typed “Gotta Go” on her computer screen, ending the stupid IM conversationshe was having with Jarrod Haynes, and turned back to her biology book as if deep in thought. Jarrod, she thought, liked to talk about Jarrod. Too bad she wasn’t as interested in the subject as he was.

“Yes?”

“Can I come in for a minute?”

“Sure, Dad.”

Her father entered and shut the door behind him.

“I tried to use the phone,” he said. “The line was busy. I need to make a call.”

Caught, Sheridan said, “I was on the Internet for a minute.”

“For an hour, you mean.”

“I’m off now.”

“I thought you were studying.”

She gestured to her open book. But she could tell that wasn’t really why he had knocked.

“Sheridan, I want to tell you that the governor offered me a job today. I’m going to be a game warden again, sort of.”

Her first reaction was a mixture of joy and desperation. She was thrilled that her dad had gotten his job back because, well, that’s what he was: a game warden.
The
game warden, as far as she was concerned. She had been with him many times while he worked, and she knew how dedicated he was.

Sheridan remembered when she had been an apprentice falconer to Nate Romanowski. Nate had been given a prairie falconthat had been hit by a car. The bird was either aggressive— likely to bite or strike out—or moody, sulking for days in the mews and refusing to eat. It was her opinion that the bird should be set free, that it would never be any good. Nate proved her wrong by taking the bird out and working with it, letting its naturalinstincts reemerge. The falcon soon became swift and efficient,eager to fly, hunt, and return to Nate. “He just needed a job,” Nate told her. “He needed to do what he was born to do. Falcons, like some people, need to
do
things. They can’t just exist.”

“Does that mean we have to move?” she asked.

“Not this time,” he said.

“So will that ass Jason Kiner go away?”

Her dad seemed confused for a minute. He said, “No. Phil Kiner will still be the Saddlestring game warden. I won’t really have a district. I’ll sort of be working freelance.”

“Like a secret agent or something?”

He smiled. She could tell he liked that characterization but didn’t want to admit it. “No, more like I’m on loan for special projects.”

She felt good about this news, but didn’t want to show it too much because that would betray the embarrassment she’d kept hidden since he lost his job.

“Sheridan,” her dad said, “I know it’s been tough on you with me being out of work and all.”

“You’re the ranch foreman,” she said quickly. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“The governor said the same thing. But we both know it’s bothered you. With Jason Kiner saying things and all. It’s bothered
me
.”

She couldn’t deny it outright. She said, “Dad, it doesn’t matter . . .”

But he waved her off. “Don’t say it. It’s not necessary.”

She found herself beaming.

“So you’re back,” she said.

He grinned. “I’m back.”

Her dad, she thought, needed to
do
things.

Joe stumbled over something in the dark kitchen of their home and nearly crashed to the floor. He righted himself on the counter, turned on the light, and beheld Lucy’s project. Three cardboard boxes marked PAPER, GLASS, and METAL. On each, she had written “To Be Recycled.” And beneath the writing, she’d drawn a stylized globe with a word balloon reading “Save me.”

“Save
me
from falling on my face,” Joe grumbled, and moved the recycling boxes into the mudroom so no one else would trip over them.

He dialed the governor’s residence in Cheyenne. Spencer Rulon listed his number in the telephone book, something he never tired of announcing to his constituents.

Voice mail: “This is Gov Spence. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you. I’ll only return calls to my constituents. If you aren’t from Wyoming, you need to call
your
governor.”

Joe said, “Governor, Joe Pickett. I accept the job. I do need to get a little more information, though. Like whom I work with in your office, how you want me to stay in contact . . .”

The governor picked up. He’d obviously been listening.

“Don’t call me again,” he said brusquely.

“But . . .”

"Chuck Ward will be in touch with you. Deal with him for everything.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t call me sir.” Joe could hear the governor smackinghis receiver with the palm of his hand, or hitting it against the wall. “This is a bad connection. Who did you say was calling?”

Joe went into the bedroom with a vague sense of unease after his conversation with the governor. He set the feeling aside when Marybeth shut off the lights, came to bed, and started kissing him with an intensity and passion that surprised and delighted him.

He turned toward her and soon they were entwined. With each movement, the old bedsprings squeaked.

When they were through, she said, “I feel like I need a cigarette,” although she had never smoked.

“How about another glass of wine?”

“No, I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?”

“I’m jazzed up,” he confessed.

“You haven’t been jazzed up in a while.”

“Thanks to you.”

She smiled and stroked his jaw. “Good night, Joe.”