Out of Range (10 page)

What would it be like to live in a house where the previous occupant had shot himself in the head? Joe shivered and tried to shake off the thought.

He found a cheap motel that honored state rates and checked in. The bedspread was green and thin, there was a single thin plastic cup and a bar of soap on the sink, and the television was locked to a stand and mounted to the wall so no one could take it. The tiny desk was just big enough to hold his briefcase.

Sitting on the bed, he put the spiral notebooks in front of him. He would start with #1 tonight, maybe get through #2.

Tomorrow, he would begin the search for #11, Will’s last notebook.

But first he needed to call home. He looked at his watch.

It was 11:30, an hour past when they usually went to bed.

He debated whether to possibly wake her, simply to tell her he had made it. Then he pictured Marybeth up and awake, maybe reading, upset he hadn’t called, possibly worried that something had happened.

He picked up the telephone. The line was dead. The receptionist, a sleepy woman with bloodshot eyes, must have forgotten to turn on his phone when he checked in. Should he rouse her? He decided not to. He pulled out his cell phone from his daypack, then punched the speed dial button. Marybeth answered in four rings.

“Joe?” He could tell she wasn’t happy. She sounded tired, and there was an icy edge to her voice. “You were supposed to call when you got there.”

“I didn’t get a chance,” he said. His speech was slurred, as much from exhaustion as the bourbon. “I was too busy getting reamed by the assistant director and then I got called out.”

“It’s nearly midnight.”

“I know,” he said lamely.

“Why didn’t you call this afternoon, then?”

“I told you. I hit the ground running over here.”

“I just fell asleep. What are you doing up?”

“I just got in.”

His cell phone chirped. It was about to run out of battery power, and he needed to recharge it, he told her.

“You sound like you’ve been drinking, Joe. And why are you calling me on your cell phone?”

“I tried to call from my motel, but the phone wouldn’t work.”

“Where are you staying?”

Joe looked up. What was the name of it? Jesus . . . One of those old western television series names.

“You don’t know?”

“The Rifleman,” he said finally, feeling stupid.

“Okay . . .” There was an edge of suspicion in her voice, and Joe didn’t like it.

“Marybeth, I couldn’t call earlier, all right? I’m sorry.

There’s a lot going on here and I got wrapped up in it. I’ll call tomorrow and we can catch up, okay?”

“I’m wide awake now, Joe,” her voice hostile.

His cell phone blinked off. He cursed and stared at it as if that would make it come back on. The charger was in his truck, and he started to get up, but stopped at the door. He wasn’t exactly sure where he’d put it, and looking for it would take a while. He was tired, and resentful of her again. What was she accusing him of ? Didn’t she know he had a job to do? Why was it necessary to pile on the guilt?

He got lonely, just like she did. All he wanted was for her to say she loved him, she missed him, and that everything was going to be fine.

He sighed. He’d call tomorrow, when he had some time, when he’d gathered his thoughts. Maybe before the funeral.

He picked up notebook #1 and began to read. Soon, the writing began to swim off the page.

Joe awoke to the sound of gunshots. He sat up quickly, disoriented for a moment. He glanced around, remembering where he was, surprised that he was still dressed and the bedside lamp was on. The opened notebook was on his lap.

No, it wasn’t a gun. It was something on the other side of the motel room wall. Joe stood, rubbing his eyes. He looked at his watch: 4:45 a.m. He heard rustling in the next room, then another bang. The sound was coming through his closet. He opened the closet door, where he’d hung his uni

form shirt and jacket on hangers that couldn’t be removed from the rod.

He sighed, knowing now what had happened. Someone in the next room was packing up their clothing from the closet. Because the hangers couldn’t be taken off the rod, as each piece was removed the rod swung back and banged into the wall.

Cheap motels, Joe thought. Staterate motels. Marybeth probably imagined him in someplace much finer. Maybe he should call her now and tell her how great it was.

He shook his head, ashamed at his thoughts, while he gathered up the notebooks and papers on the bed and stowed them neatly in his briefcase. He brushed his teeth, folded his clothes, turned off the light, and crawled into bed.

That’s when something about Will’s office hit him. Will Jensen was a meticulous man, from what Joe knew about him. His notes were precise, detailed, well reasoned. His office was spare and utilitarian, without a single frill or anything personal in it. Will was known for his even temper, his calmness. He was probably like Joe, who even when flustered or bad tempered couldn’t just forget about something and move on until everything was neat and in order. It didn’t fit that Will, contemplating his own suicide, would rise from his desk in his office with papers scattered and a half drunk can of Mountain Dew on his desk, his computer still on, and go home and end it all. Wouldn’t Will have at least cleaned up a little, knowing what he was going to do?

Ten

On Friday morning, ex–Twelve Sleep County Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum was seated at his usual place in the Stockman’s Bar when he saw the stranger. The tall man stepped inside, let the door wheeze shut behind him, and stood there without moving, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness inside. It was eleven in the morning. Barnum didn’t know the man, which in itself meant something. Barnum knew everybody.

Rarely did someone simply happen by Saddlestring, Barnum knew. The town was too outoftheway. It wasn’t conveniently en route to anywhere. The exsheriff had studied strangers coming into his town for over thirty years. He could usually size them up quickly. They tended to fall into categories: outdoorsmen, roughnecks, tourists, ranch hands looking for work, junior sales representatives stuck with a bad, farflung territory. This man wasn’t any of those. Something about him, the way he moved and the fact that he seemed supremely comfortable in his own skin, Barnum thought, was menacing.

The tall man was in his late fifties or early sixties, with a shock of gray hair and a chiseled face. He was slim with broad shoulders, and Barnum noted how the stranger’s dark brown leather coat stretched across his back as he found a stool and sat down. The man had a flat belly, which to Barnum was a physical characteristic he mistrusted. Cop, Barnum thought, or military. He had that ramrodstraight, nononsense air about him. Barnum wondered if the tall man felt the same thing about him sitting there. Barnum knew he looked like a cop, and always had. His mother once told him he looked like a cop when he was born. She said that even as a baby he had those suspicious, penetrating eyes, and the jowly, hangdog face that seemed to say, in cynical resignation, “Now what?”

Barnum had been reading the Saddlestring Roundup and drinking coffee. He hated both the local newspaper and the bitter coffee, but this is what he did now that he was retired. It was part of his routine. He still began each morning at the BurgOPardner, as he had when he was sheriff, drinking coffee, catching up on local news and gossip, and eating rolls with the other local “morning men.” The morning men at the BurgOPardner were the men who owned most of Saddlestring and much of the county. Most were retired now as well, but still had local business interests.

Guy Allen owned the BurgOPardner and had the majority share of the Stockman’s. Just that morning, Guy had been talking about the weather in Arizona, how pleasant it was. He’d be leaving soon, going to his home in Arizona, as winter moved into Wyoming. So would half of the other morning men. Barnum, who still lived fulltime in Saddlestring and probably always would, got quiet during discussions of Arizona weather. Any chance he’d had of buying a winter place somewhere warm had disappeared when a bad land investment the previous year had taken his pension, and the ensuing scandal had cost him his job and his reputation. All that was left of his career was a solid gold Parker pen his deputies had chipped in for. The pen was inscribed: to sheriff barnum for 28 years of svc. “svc” meant “service,” McLanahan had explained, but the inscriber ran out of room on the pen.

He was acutely aware of how differently the morning conversations flowed since he was no longer sheriff. The men used to listen to him, to defer, to stop talking when he spoke. They would nod their heads sympathetically when he complained. Now he could see them glancing at one another while he spoke, waiting for him to finish. Sometimes, the mayor would cut him off and launch into a new topic.

He was just another retired old bastard, taking up their time. The kind of old fart Barnum used to glare at until the interloper would pick up his coffee cup and go away.

When the morning men broke up around 9:30, Barnum walked down the main street and set up shop here, in the Stockman’s, where he would remain most of the day and some of the night. If people needed to talk to him, they knew where he would be. If someone came into the place before he got there and took his seat, which was the farthest stool at the corner of the bar where the counter wrapped toward the wall, the bartender would shoo the customer away when Barnum walked in. That’s Sheriff Barnum’s office, the bartender would say.

Barnum didn’t stare at the tall man who had come into the bar. Instead, he shot occasional glances at him over the top of the halfglasses he needed to wear to read the paper.

The tall man ordered coffee, and as he sipped it he looked around the place, taking in the ancient knotty pine and mirrored back bar, the mounted biggame heads that stared blankly down at him, the blackandwhite rodeo photos that covered the wall behind him. The Stockman’s was a long, narrow chute of a room with the bar taking up over half of it and some booths and a pool table at the back near the restrooms. A jukebox played Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Gun to Town.”

As the bartender refilled the stranger’s mug, the man asked him something in a muted voice. Barnum couldn’t hear the exchange over the song on the jukebox. Then the tall man stood and nodded at Barnum. Barnum nodded back. “Cute little town you’ve got here,” the tall man said, making his way toward the bathroom.

“It doesn’t look like a place that can eat you up and spit you out, does it?” Barnum asked.

The tall man hesitated a step, looked curiously at Barnum, then continued.

As the restroom door shut, Barnum slid off his stool, walked the length of the bar, and stepped outside. The cold sunshine blinded him momentarily, and he raised his arm to block out the sun. The tall man’s latemodel SUV was parked diagonally in front of the bar. Barnum circled it quickly, noting the Virginia plates, the mud on the panels probably from back roads, the fact that the back seat was folded down to accommodate duffel bags, hardsided equipment boxes, and a stainless steel rifle case as long as the SUV floor. He walked back into the bar and assumed his seat.

Barnum raised a finger to the bartender, a halfblind former rodeo team coach named Buck Timberman. Buck had been a bigtime bullrider but had retired after a bull stepped on his head and crushed it, resulting in brain damage. He still wore his national finals belt buckles, though, rotating them so he wore a different one each day of the week.

Barnum liked Timberman because Buck was staunchly loyal, even stupidly loyal, and he still referred to Barnum as “Sheriff.”

“Changeover time,” Barnum said, thrusting his coffee cup forward.

“It’s only eleventhirty,” Timberman said, looking at his wristwatch. “You’ve got a half hour before noon.”

“So it’s onethirty Eastern,” Barnum growled, “which means we’ve wasted an hour and a half of drinking time.”

Timberman frowned while he drew a beer and poured a shot. “Why Eastern time?”

“Our new friend here is used to Eastern,” Barnum said.

“Didn’t you notice how he said ‘here’? He said ‘here’ like JFK. He’s from Boston or someplace, but he’s got Virginia plates and a lot of outdoor gear in his rig. Judging by the dirt on that car, I’m guessing he didn’t fly and rent, he drove out all the way.”

“I ain’t seen him in here before,” Timberman said, taking the coffee cup and replacing it with the draft and the shot.

“Nope,” Barnum said. “He was asking you something a minute ago. What was it?”

Timberman looked over Barnum’s shoulder to make sure the tall man wasn’t coming back yet. “He’s got an interest in falconry. He asked me if I knew of anybody around here who might have birds available. He also asked me if we have a range where he can sight in his hunting rifle. And he wanted to know where the bathroom is.”

When the tall man returned he found a shot of bourbon and a glass of beer next to his coffee cup. He looked toward Timberman, who pointed to the exsheriff.

“Cheers,” Barnum said, raising his shot glass and sipping the top off.

“Thanks are in order,” the man said to Barnum, tentatively raising his whiskey, “but it’s pretty early in the day.”

Barnum said, “It’s never too early to treat a visitor to some cowboy hospitality.”

The tall man sipped half of his shot, winced, and chased it with a long pull from the beer, never taking his piercing brown eyes off Barnum.

“Who says I’m visiting?” the tall man asked.

Barnum tipped his head toward Timberman. “Buck here said you were asking about falcons.”

“So much for the famed confidentiality of the bartend

ing profession,” the tall man said evenly. In his peripheral vision, Barnum could see Timberman suddenly look down at his shoes and shuffle away.

“I asked him,” Barnum said. “What he told me will be treated with confidence.”