Free Fire - C. J. Box [49]
She covered the home front. Everyone was doing fine and it was too soon to really miss him. An employee in her Powell office had gotten angry and walked out for no good reason. Missy was snubbing her because, Marybeth assumed, her suspicions about Earl Alden and the arts council were correct.
“Fine with me,” Marybeth said.
Joe recounted his day: the drive up, the arrest of Bear, the meeting, drinks with Judy Demming.
As he told her, he could feel her mood change, not by what she said but by the silence.
“You’d like her,” he said. “She’s trying to help me out up here even though her bosses probably wish she wouldn’t. You’ll need to meet her when you come up.”
She asked for a description.
“Early forties, married, mother of two,” he said. “She and her family live in broken-down federal housing and she says she’s lost in the system. Kind of sounds familiar, huh?”
“She sounds nice,” Marybeth said.
Changing tack, he asked, “Have you heard anything from Nate? Any idea when he’s leaving?”
“He’s already gone,” she said. “He left a message on our phone tonight. I meant to tell you about that earlier.”
“Did he say when he’d get up here?”
“No. Just to tell you he was on his way but he needed to tend to something in Cody first.”
“So maybe tomorrow,” Joe said.
“I’d assume.”
She waited a beat. “How are you doing, Joe?”
He knew what she was referring to. He described his room, the hotel, the feeling he’d had since he arrived of the presence of ghosts.
“Does anyone know about your brother?”
“No. It’s not important that they know.”
They made plans for Marybeth to bring the girls to the park in a week.
Although tired, joe couldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. He couldn’t determine if it was the strange bed, the unfamiliar night moans of an old building, or the particularlyvivid dream he’d had of sleeping on the floor at the side of the bed, knowing his parents were tossing and turning two feet away. He awoke to the foul, sour odor of his dad’s breath after a night of drinking.
He sat up and found his duffel bag with his equipment in it and assembled his Glock and put it on the nightstand.
When he opened the window to let in the cold night air, he thought he saw two figures down on the lawn in the shadows, hand-cupping tiny red dots of lit cigarettes. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again, they’d been replaced by a cow elk and her calf.
part three
YELLOWSTONE GAME PROTECTION ACT, 1894
AN ACT TO PROTECT THE BIRDS AND
ANIMALS IN YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL
PARK, AND TO PUNISH CRIMES IN SAID PARK,
AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES,
Approved May 7, 1894 (28 Stat. 73)
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Yellowstone National Park, as its boundaries are now defined, or as they may be hereafter defined or extended, shall be under the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States; and that all the laws applicable to places under the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States shall have force and effect in said park: Provided, however, That nothing in this act shall be construed to forbid the service in the park of any civil or criminalprocess of any court having jurisdiction in the States of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. All fugitives from justice taking refuge in said park shall be subject to the same laws as refugees from justice found in the State of Wyoming. (U.S.C., title 16, sec. 24.)
SEC. 2. That said park, for all the purposes of this act, shall constitute a part of the United States judicial district of Wyoming, and the district and circuit courts of the United States in and for said district shall have jurisdiction of all offenses committed within said park.
9
The next morning, joe waited alone in the hotellobby for Demming to arrive. There were no other guests up and around so early and he had the entire lobby to himself. He sat in an overstuffed chair and read a day-old Billings