Free Fire - C. J. Box [22]
Finally, as the last cow crossed, leaving blacktop spattered with steaming piles of viscous dung, McCann shifted into drive and accelerated.
McCann was nearly out of the park. He was going home.
The ranger at the West Yellowstone gate waved a cheery “Good-bye!” from her little gatehouse as he slowed to leave the park. The town of West Yellowstone was just ahead.
Although she waved him through, McCann stopped next to the exit window, powered down his window, and thrust his face outside so she could see him.
She began to say, “You don’t need to stop . . .” when she recognizedhim. Her eyes widened and her mouth pulled back in a grimace and she inadvertently stepped back, knocking a sheaf of Yellowstone News flyers to the ground outside her box. “My God,” she mouthed.
“Have a pleasant night,” he said, basking in her reaction, knowing now, for sure, he’d entered the rarified air of celebrity.
He’d been away for nearly three months. During that time, Clay McCann had gone from a semi-obscure small-town lawyer specializing in contracts and criminal defense law to beingknown both nationally and internationally. For a brief time, every utterance he made to reporters inside the tiny jailhouse at Mammoth Hot Springs made the wire services. Profiles of him and the Yellowstone Zone of Death appeared in a half-dozen nationalpublications. For a delicious week or two, his face and the crime were as familiar to viewers of twenty-four-hour cable networks as any celebrity criminal or victim. His arguments beforethe court were dissected by celebrity lawyers who predicted,correctly, that he’d win, which he did. Although the federal prosecutors threatened loudly to appeal the decision to the Tenth Circuit and the Supreme Court, the thirty days allowedto file had lapsed and he’d received no notification. McCannbanked on the assumption that the Feds didn’t want the case to go further with the very likely possibility that higher courts would have to declare that the Zone of Death actually existed.
He was as free as those buffalo back on the road. Originally, the news of the murders burned bright and his face was everywhere.Reporters and cameramen camped out on the lawn of the old Yellowstone jail, sharing the grass with grazing elk. But the story soon became eclipsed by the circumstances. He faded out of it, and other crimes that had more appeal—like blondes found missing on islands or cruise ships—overtook the hard-to-understandconcept of vicinage and the Sixth Amendment, and he was discarded onto the electronic landfill of old news. It was expensive, a reporter told him, for the network to keep a team out there in the middle of nowhere with little to report. Plus, he complained, there was nothing to do at night for the crew. Eventually,they all left. But McCann had no doubt he was still hot stuff up and down the Rocky Mountains.
He drove through the empty, familiar streets of West Yellowstone as the few overhead lights charged, hummed, and lit against the coming darkness. His house was located in a cul-de-sac within a stand of thick lodgepole pines west of town. His neighbors were a doctor and a fly-fishing guide who had turned his name into a well-known brand. The doctor and guide were among the elite in town and it was an exclusive, if tiny, neighborhood.McCann had acquired his house in a foreclosure auction,but nevertheless.
As he pulled into his driveway he saw immediately that his house had been vandalized. The windows were broken and FILTHY FUCKING MURDERER was spray-painted in red on the front door, drips of paint crawling down the wood like dried blood.
He charged up the walk and kicked through weeks of porch-deliverednewspapers and entered his dark house to find the power and water shut off. He experienced