Winterkill - C. J. Box [53]
You weren’t, Joe thought. Luckily, though, he had stumbled into Bighorn Road—and then Joe had hit him with his car.
Joe stared at the ceiling tiles, trying to figure it all out.
“I think it was those goddamned Sovereigns,” Wardell mumbled.
“What makes you say that?” Joe asked, but although Wardell’s eyelids flickered he didn’t respond. Wardell was asleep.
The nurse was back at the door. “Good night, Mr. Pickett. Drive safely. It’s cold and icy out there.”
Joe let himself be ushered out.
In the lobby, the emergency-room doctor was pulling his coat on to leave after his shift.
“Quiet night, except for you,” the doctor said, winking, and offered Joe a ride home. Joe accepted gratefully.
Outside, it was still dark and the wind was bitter, and it sliced right through his clothing. The doctor drove a Jeep Cherokee, a vehicle prized locally because of how fast the heater started working.
Joe sank back in the leather seat, realizing how exhausted he was. He liked the doctor because the man felt no compulsion to start up a conversation.
Joe thought about what Wardell had said. He thought about how cruel it was of the driver of the light-colored truck to leave Wardell behind like that. Surely the driver would have seen or heard Wardell crash, and realize that if Wardell wasn’t killed on impact, he would likely freeze to death out there. Either way, it was a bad way to die. It had suddenly occurred to Joe when he was talking to Wardell that the viciousness was similar to how Lamar Gardiner had been treated.
If the same person who was responsible for Gardiner’s murder was involved in leaving Birch Wardell to freeze to death, then the killer was not Nate Romanowski. The likelihood that the perpetrator was a Sovereign, as Wardell had suggested, didn’t make sense to Joe, since Birch had seen the truck well before the Sovereigns had set up camp. It was unlikely, Joe knew, that any of the Sovereigns—including Jeannie Keeley—had the kind of intimate familiarity with the BLM land and the complicated terrain within it to know the secret route that Wardell said the light-colored pickup had taken. Joe shuddered. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that neither the Sovereigns nor Nate Romanowski were to blame. And that the real killer was still out there.
They drove slowly down Main Street while the defroster cleared ever-larger sweating holes in the ice on the windshield. Saddlestring was still. Streetlights illuminated the clouds of heat and steam that escaped from the vents of dark buildings, giving the illusion that they were silently breathing. Joe noticed a few more cars than normal still parked downtown, and guessed they belonged to revelers who would come and get them in the morning.
The only place with lights and cars out front was the Elks Club. As they passed, Joe rolled his head over on the headrest. A couple stood in profile in the front door, backlit by a bare porch light, their outlines in silhouette. The woman wrapped her arms around the man, and his cowboy hat tipped back as he lowered his head to kiss her.
Joe moaned, and turned to stare straight out the front window.
“Are you alright?” the doctor asked.
“Yup,” Joe answered. “I just thought I saw my mother-in-law back there.”
Joe thanked the doctor and gingerly approached his front door, careful of the ice on the walk. Inside, he confirmed that the couch bed had not been slept in.
Dragging himself upstairs, he wondered how long it would take for word to get out that another federal employee in Twelve Sleep County had been assaulted.
The news would no doubt supercharge Melinda Strickland’s crusade.
Fourteen
On Sunday, New Year’s Day, Joe mixed pancake batter in a bowl with a whisk and watched the snow fall outside the kitchen window. It was a light snow, powdery as flour, and it skittered along over the top of the week-old glaze, settling into cracks and crevices. In the living room, the