Free Fire - C. J. Box [142]
There had been a time when Sheridan was his constant companion,his assistant, his tool pusher, when it came to chores and repairs. She was his little buddy, and she knew the differencebetween a socket and a crescent wrench. She kept up a constant patter of questions and observations while he worked, even though she sometimes distracted him. It was silent now. He’d foolishly thought she’d be eager to help him since he’d been gone so much, forgetting she was a teenager with her own interests and a priority list where “helping Dad” had dropped very low. That she’d come outside to hold the ladder was a consciousacknowledgment of those old days, and that she’d gone back into the house was a statement of how it was now. It made him feel sad, made him miss how it had once been.
It was a crisp, cool, windless fall day. A dusting of snow above treeline on the Bighorns in the distance made the mountainsand the sky seem even bluer, and even as he tacked the galvanized nails through the battered shingles into the plywood sheeting he kept stealing glances at the horizon as if sneaking looks at a lifeguard in her bikini at the municipal pool. He couldn’t help himself—he wished he were up there.
Joe Pickett had once been the game warden of the Saddlestringdistrict and the mountains and foothills had been his responsibility. That was before he was fired by the director of the state agency, a Machiavellian bureaucrat named Randy Pope.
From where he stood on the roof, he could look out and see most of the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming. It was quiet, he supposed, but not the kind of quiet he’d been used to. Through the leafless cottonwoods he could see the reflective wink of cars as they coursed down the streets, and he could hear shouts and commands from the coaches on the high school football field as the Twelve Sleep High Wranglers held a scrimmage. Somewhereup on the hill a chainsaw coughed and started and roared to cut firewood. Like a pocket of aspen in the fold of a mountain range, the town of Saddlestring seemed packed into this deep U-shaped bend of the Twelve Sleep River and was laid out along the contours of the river until the buildings finally played out on the sagebrush flats but the river went on. He could see other roofs, and the anemic downtown where the tallest structurewas the wrought iron and neon bucking horse on the top of the Stockman’s Bar.
In the back pocket of his worn Wranglers was a long list of “To-dos” that had accumulated for the past month. Marybeth had made most of the entries, but he had listed a few himself. The first five entries were:
Fix roof
Clean gutters
Bring hoses in
Fix back fence
Winterize lawn
The list went on from there for the entire page and half of the back. Joe knew if he worked the entire day and into the night he wouldn’t complete the list, even if Sheridan was helping him, which she wasn’t. Plus, experience told him there would be a snag of some kind that would derail him and frustrate his progress, something simple but unanticipated. The gutter would detach from the house while he scraped the leaves out of it, or the lumber store wouldn’t have the right fence slats and they’d need to order them. Something. Like when the tree branches started to shiver and shake as a gust of wind from the north rolled through them with just enough muscle to catch the ladder and send it clattering straight backward from the house to the lawn as if it had been shot. And there he was, stranded on the top of the roof of a house he really didn’t even want to live in, much less own.
The wind went away just as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Sheridan?”
No response. She was very likely back in bed.
“Sheridan? Lucy? Marybeth?” He paused, “Anybody?”
He thought of