Cold Wind - C. J. Box [112]
He said, “I’m headed back, but I’ll keep my phone on. I’ve got a stop to make on the way.”
Then: “I’m really disappointed in Dulcie. But she’s probably going to put your mother away. The women’s prison is in Lusk, by the way, if you ever want to visit her.”
Glendo Reservoir shimmered in the moonlight to the north and east of the highway. There were a couple of boats out there in the dark, walleye fisherman Joe guessed, and a few lights across the lake from a campground.
After his conversation with Schalk, he got angrier with each mile traveled. He was angry with Dulcie Schalk, Sheriff McLanahan, Bud Sr., Bud Jr., Orin Smith—the whole lot of them. But he traced most of his anger to his own frustration with himself. He couldn’t crack this thing, he might never be able to crack it, and he wasn’t sure, deep down, he wanted to.
What Smith had told him about The Earl and the way business was done in the country these days had instilled a deep and hopeless strain of melancholy. There was no right and no wrong anymore.
34
After filling his Jeep with gasoline in Jackson, Nate drove north and east toward the dark Gros Ventre Mountains via Togwotee Pass.
He pulled over on the two-lane highway before he reached the Togwotee Mountain Lodge. He got out and kept the engine running. There were walls of lodgepole pines on each side of the road and a channel of sky above his head like a river carrying fallen stars. The high mountain air, piney and cool with oncoming fall, helped place him back where he needed to be. Behind him, through the narrow clearing in the trees due to the road, he could see the tops of the Teton Range silhouetted on the horizon like the teeth of a frozen buzz saw. He reached down beneath the seat and checked to make sure his .500 hadn’t been stolen. It was there.
He shed his Jackson Hole clothes and threw them into a pile in the back and pulled on jeans and a heavy shirt. He laced his boots on tight.
Nate swung himself back into the cab of the Jeep and eased off the shoulder onto the blacktop. He hoped he could make it over the summit to Dubois before all the restaurants closed. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast in Chicago.
He planned to drive all night until he found and killed the person who’d given him up.
Nate leaned into the switchback turns coming down off the mountain. He drove fast and kept his lights dim so he could see beyond the orb of headlights for the eye reflections of elk or cows or mule deer on the road.
He thought about Alisha, how he hadn’t yet allowed himself to really mourn her. Even when he’d built the scaffolding for her body, he’d concentrated on the construction of it, the materials, the timbers, the sinews holding the joints together. How he’d hoist the body up without letting it fall apart on him. And he’d left her without looking back.
Still, though, he hadn’t wrapped his mind around the fact that she was really, truly gone.
He just knew he couldn’t do it, mourn her, until he’d avenged her first. In a strange way that made him feel increasingly guilty, he knew the journey to Eden and Chicago and back had been done with such a murderous single-mindedness that he’d used it to justify pushing his feelings away.
After it was done, he would slip onto the res and talk to Alisha’s relatives and the little girl she was taking care of and allow his focus and rage to turn into something else.
He wasn’t sure how to do it when the time came, what to say, or what words to use.
For the first time since it had happened, he gave it some consideration. Joe could help, he knew. Joe and Marybeth, especially. They were in the mainstream of sorts and Nate’s only real connection to the world of loving couples, growing children, mortgages, pet dogs, lawns, and social mores. It was a world he wished he understood and hoped he could enter some day, but it was still as foreign to him as daily life in Outer Mongolia. But because Joe and Marybeth were his only true connection to that