Blood Trail - C. J. Box [95]
The only other occupants in the room were a couple at a table in the far corner and their child (he assumed), a toddler, playing quietly with plastic blocks. Although the couple was required to sit on opposite sides of the table (she’d checked “Kissing Only”), they strained forward across the tabletop to get closer. She was dark and Hispanic, her perfume so strong Joe could smell it from across the room. He wondered how she’d outmaneuvered the admin guards in regard to the posted “No skintight or revealing clothing” regulation. She wore jeans that looked spray-painted on and a tight white Lycra top that clung to her breasts like a film. He was lean, shaved bald, olive-skinned, and heavily tattooed. His arms were outstretched, his hands on her shoulders, pulling her toward him. She strained toward him, her own arms outstretched, her fingers furiously caressing the tips of the collar of his white jumpsuit with a kind of unrestrained animal lust that Joe found both riveting and revolting. The inmate looked as if he would explode at any second. He was red-faced, his eyes wide, his face inches from hers. Joe hoped the guard had his wet wipes at the ready.
“I think I’ll take the other corner,” Joe said.
“Good idea,” the officer said, then, shouting to the couple, “Hey, dial it back a notch over there! It’s kissing only—no fondling. You know the rules.”
A GUNMETAL gray door opened on the wall opposite where Joe had signed in and Vern Dunnegan entered the room. At the sight of his old supervisor, Joe felt his stomach and rectum involuntarily clench and his breathing get short and shallow. He hadn’t seen the man for eight years, but here he was.
Vern wore an orange jumpsuit with no pockets and blue rubber shoes. He was thicker than he used to be, his face more doughy and his limbs and belly turned to flab. His hair was thinner and grayer and pasted back on his large head, and he was clean-shaven, which revealed a reptilian demeanor that had always been there but was masked by the beard he used to wear. Despite the avuncular smile on his face when he saw Joe, Vern’s eyes were obsidian black and without depth, as if blocked off from the inside. Joe remembered the whole package. Vern could smile at you while he stabbed you in the heart.
Vern Dunnegan had once been the Wyoming game warden for the Saddlestring District. Vern had considered Joe his protégé and Joe naively thought of Vern as his mentor. But Vern was one of the old-time wardens, the kind who bent the law to suit his needs and curry favor, a one-man cop, judge, and jury who used his badge and the autonomous nature of the job to manipulate the community and increase both his influence and his income. In those days, before the discovery of coal-bed methane, Twelve Sleep County was in an economic slump and those who lived there were scrambling to stay afloat. Vern and Joe, both state employees with salaries and vehicles and insurance and pensions, were the envy of most of the working people. Joe fought against the uncomfortable recollection of how it once was between them, when he was the green trainee and Vern the wily vet. Although Marybeth always distrusted the man, Joe refused to see it while he worked under him. It wasn’t until Vern quit and came back as a landman representing a natural gas pipeline company that Joe found out what Vern’s bitter worldview was all about, as his former boss set up a scenario that led to Marybeth’s being shot and losing their baby