CHAPTER 1

A PALE AND NEARLY full moon hung in the western sky, casting ghostly sagebrush and cottonwood shadows on the alkali patch where a man crouched against a concrete cistern.  The moon, when it had risen out of Dead Horse Gulch across the Big Horn River six hours earlier, had been an orange beauty; now, high in the night sky, it looked like a bleached skull.  The man waited in the chill morning air, cradling a twelve-gauge shotgun that had belonged to his father.  The man felt his fifty-eight years as he turned his ear toward the lane leading to his driveway.

Four feet from the man a jackrabbit, frozen in the moonlight, stared at him.  Across the river sandstone bluffs rose like an ancient mausoleum.  Jan Kucera wished he would quit thinking in funerary terms.  Even more he wished Monster were with him. 

Crouching in the dark, Jan took deep breaths of pungent, sage-scented night air.  Breathing deeply made him lightheaded, but it helped calm him.  He laid the old Winchester atop the cistern his father had poured from concrete he had mixed in a wheelbarrow.  When Jan was a boy the cistern had held the family’s drinking water.

Jan heard the distinctive clicking of a diesel engine and watched a shadowy black pickup truck creep down his driveway, lights out, its tires crunching the pea-gravel.  The pickup stopped.  Two dark figures slid out and made their way to Jan’s bedroom window.  They looked around.  One of them quietly took a folding chair off the porch and placed it underneath the window.  He climbed up on in, racked the slide on his gun and sprayed the darkened room with automatic weapon fire.  Then they attacked the front door.  The shorter of the two blasted the doorknob and kicked the door open and they both charged inside. Thirty seconds later they reappeared and scanned they yard, looking for something.

“Somebody warned him,” the short one said. “His pickup is here, so he’s here.  But we’ll never find him in the scrub at night.  Get the cans.”

They lifted two five-gallon gasoline cans from the pickup’s bed.  Leaving their weapons on the tailgate, they carried the gas cans to the porch.  At that moment, Jan stepped from the shadow of the cistern, pumped a shell into the shotgun chamber, and with his right hand, punched the radio control switch in his jacket pocket.  Suddenly the farmyard was lit by 6,000 halogen watts, transforming it into near daylight. The gunmen, blinded by the intense light, froze like the jackrabbit.

“Set the cans on the deck and keep your hands where I can see them,” Jan said.

The short, stocky gunman glanced toward the truck.  Jan triggered the shotgun and blew the gas can out of his hands. The man went down screaming as Jan jacked another round into the shotgun.

***

John Broadbeck, at his desk in the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office in Basin City, wiped gun oil off the nine-inch stainless steel barrel of a Ruger Super Redhawk. The huge .44 magnum looked delicate in his meaty hands.  A Pall Mall cigarette hung from his big lips, smoke curling towards the ceiling.  Sheriff Broadbeck had locked Jan’s two would-be assassins in a holding cell and was waiting for the county ambulance to transport the injured one to the hospital for treatment.

The cigarette failed to hide the pungent odor that drifted on the air from the 100-year-old basement walls of Big Horn County Courthouse.  In the daytime, light poured into the office through large windows, but at night the place was borderline dungeon, lit by a pair of bare 300-watt bulbs on the ceiling.  Sheriff Broadbeck had decorated his office in Louis L’Amour basic right down to the longhorn steer horns on the wall above the desk.  A gun rack along the back wall housed a dozen rifles, revolvers, and clip-fed pistols, all locked in place by a steel rod running through the trigger guards.

“Jan,” Sheriff Broadbeck said, “these two are about as likely to give up Prophet Hansen as Bill Clinton is to keep his pants on.  They know the Constitution better than Ruth Bader Ginsburg—not to mention they have better ankles.”

Raising his voice so the young men could hear, the sheriff said, “But they’re two sweeties, all right.  Jan, you think Hansen is tiring of his thirteen wives and turning to soft young men?”

“What about it, boys?” John Broadbeck yelled over his shoulder without turning his head,  “Has the Prophet added you two sissies to his harem?”

Broadbeck’s voice, Jan thought, rolled out of his massive chest like music from the subwoofers the teenagers cranked up full volume in their cars while romancing their dates on the dark lanes around his ranch.  The edge of Sheriff Broadbeck’s mouth twitched slightly.  Jan assumed harassing the two shooters amused the sheriff.

Jan had known John Broadbeck since they were kids.  He was known as “Monster John” during high school.  Broadbeck stood six-four, and had been a 240 pound vision as a varsity linebacker, strong and quick.  Even now, wearing a slab of fat like a Kevlar vest, he could pick up two men, one in each hand, and throw them into his cruiser—something he occasionally did.  Tonight Jan remembered that Monster had once arrested Jan’s older brother, Buzz, on a bad check charge in the Stockman’s Bar.  The sheriff had walked in smiling and waving a warrant.  Buzz later told Jan he had been so drunk and so terrified by the leering figure stalking him across the barroom floor that he ran outside, jumped into his car, and slammed the door.  The problem was, he wasn’t all the way in the car and slammed his head in the door.  The sheriff said it was the easiest arrest he had ever made—“The perpetrator knocked himself out!”  All that before Buzz drank himself into an early grave, one more victim of the Wyoming oil patch.

Jan, confused and frightened by the attempt on his life, looked at Monster Broadbeck as his only line of defense from those who wanted him dead and who were determined to get the job done.  People feared Sheriff Broadbeck, especially the assorted drifters, unemployed roughnecks, and drunks throughout Big Horn County; most of the upstanding citizenry, if they didn’t fear him, respected him.  Somehow, even though the sheriff was not universally liked, he was elected term after term.  People knew Big Horn County was a safer place because Monster Broadbeck strolled the streets of the small communities and cruised the dusty county roads.  Monster handled his Ruger with unexpected grace considering his lumbering appearance.  Dooley, the barman at the Stockman’s Bar, routinely piled sandbags at one end of the barroom and took $100 bets that Monster could plug a silver dollar clean through at twenty-five feet—one shot off a quick-draw.  If he missed or broke the rim of the coin, Dooley paid the bet.  Dooley split the winnings with Monster and the bettor got to keep the dollar—and Monster’s good will.  A silver dollar with a hole through it often deflected a speeding ticket in Big Horn County.

“What about you?” Monster John was saying to Jan.  “You ain’t goin’ back out to the homestead tonight with Hansen’s Avenging Angels looking for you like you’re Salman Rushdie?”

“Well, I don’t think they will do anything else for a day or so,” Jan said.

Monster snorted.

“Well, hombre, flaunting your invulnerability before Prophet Ronald Hansen the third is about as smart as dating O. J. Simpson’s girlfriend—at least before Simpson began getting his sunlight through a pipe.  I wouldn’t be in a hurry to challenge Hansen to finish the job he began tonight.”

“That he began two years ago,” Jan corrected.

“OK, two years ago.”

“With Emma’s murder,” Jan said, his voice rising slightly at the thought of his dead wife.

“I know, I know partner…We’ll bring the Prophet down, Jan.”

“Will we?”

Monster was silent, then he said, “If we don’t, I guess you’ll be a dead man.”

“Yeah,” Jan said, “I will if we don’t stop him.”

“I’m as frustrated as you are, boy.  But it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Jan knew Monster was smarting over his failure to make a case against Hansen for Emma’s murder.  Nobody, before this time, had been able to stand up to Monster Broadbeck in Big Horn County.  Normally, Monster would have—by whatever means—enforced his own “natural justice.”  But Hansen had erected a wall of defense that even Sheriff John Broadbeck had been unable to breach.  “Redoubtable” was how the sheriff had once referred to Hansen in Jan’s presence.  Monster, at the time, stared out the window of his office, chewing on an unlit Pall Mall.

“Look, John,” Jan said, “I really don’t know where we go from here.  I know you’re my only real ally.  The Feds have demonstrated that they are powerless to move against Hansen.  I thought maybe I could get past all this…”  His voice trailed off.

Monster was silent for awhile.  He continued to play with the Ruger, snapping the cylinder open, examining the load, popping the cylinder shut.

“Anyway,” Jan continued, “tonight has taught me one thing for sure—this certainly isn’t over.  It will never be over until I—or we—end it.”

Monster slipped the Ruger back into its holster. “We’ll end it, all right.”

“Let’s talk about it in a day or so,” Jan said.  “Right now, if you think you’re safe with these two hitmen, I think I’ll slip over to the café for a short stack and coffee.”

“Ginny workin’ this morning?”

Jan ignored the question and said.  “By the way, John, I don’t think there’s any point in sweating these guys.”

“Yeah, yeah.  I know, amigo, I’m not going to waste county water by rinsing their hair in the toilet.  As I said, they won’t give up the Prophet.”

Jan headed out, Monster throwing him a set of keys to an extra county vehicle to drive home, saying he would have a deputy pick it up later.  Monster would hold the gunmen until federal agents made the four-hour drive from Casper to pick them up for arraignment on automatic weapons charges.

***

Basin City was beginning to glow in the early dawn as Jan walked from the sheriff’s office toward the Basin Café.  The buildings of the block-long main street had survived from Jan’s youth.  A few modern facades covered the brick and sandstone structures, but new construction was out of the question—the town was dying.  Business went to Worland, or Billings, or Casper.  Gone were the shops of the 1950s.  Back then Basin supported two drug stores, three saloons, a pool hall, a bakery, two grocery stores, a couple of clothing stores and hardware stores, and two cafés.  Jan would spend all Saturday afternoon at the Wigwam Theater watching two movies, three cartoons, a serial, and a newsreel.  Back then Ethel’s Variety Store had merchandise stacked to the ceiling, everything from thread to greeting cards, candy to shoe polish.  Ethel could find anything you needed—if you had enough time for her to dig through all the stuff.

When Jan was a teenager, he and Ginny Hollingsworth would hang out at Larry Lowrey’s Drug Store, listening to the jukebox and drinking graveyard Cokes.  A couple of years later he would hang out at the pool hall, smoking Camels and playing pea-pool for dimes.  Eventually he hung out at the city reservoir, drinking Coors.  Since Emma had died he hung out at the ranch, drinking way too much whiskey.

***

At the Basin Café, Virginia Hollingsworth was looking almost as good as she had in high school. Remarkably trim for her fifty-five years, she still had the graceful moves that had fascinated him and all the other boys at Basin High School.  In the two years since Emma’s death, Virginia had watched Jan through soft eyes.

Jan took a stool at the counter, one of those his father had used fifty years earlier when he had pancakes and bacon before beginning his workday.  Ginny moved toward him.

“Coffee, Jan?”

“Yeah, coffee, Ginny.”

“What brings you to town so early?”

“I had a load of trash to drop off.”

Ginny glanced up quizzically.  “The landfill doesn’t open until nine o’clock and it’s not six o’clock yet?”

She slid a cup of coffee in front of him and leaned against the back counter, then folded her arms across her chest and squinted her eyes like someone facing into bright sunlight.  She did that, Jan remembered, years ago, when she was a self-conscious teenage beauty.  Her auburn hair today was shoulder length and naturally curly, lying in soft springy layers around her face.  High cheekbones and faint red eyebrows framed dark chestnut-brown eyes.  And she still had freckles.

“Anything else?” Ginny asked.

“Not right now.”

“Are you doing OK, Jan?  You look…well, weary.”

“I’ve had a bad night.”

She was silent.  After a moment, she squinted her eyes again, smiled sweetly, and flowed off toward the kitchen.  Jan inhaled the warm steam off the cup, rolled it around and watched the reflection of the lights dance on the surface of the coffee.  Ginny—the one woman as kind-hearted as Emma had been.

***

After breakfast, Jan drove six miles south to the ranch—his mother had always referred to the family homestead as the ranch, even though they had never run cattle there. They had grown some alfalfa, a little grain, and melons.  To Jan it would always be the ranch.

Approaching his lane, he deactivated the security system.  Made up of laser security detectors set at waist level, the system lined the half-mile lane that was the only approach to his place.  The detectors were high enough not to be set off by jackrabbits, and birds flew through the beams too fast to set them off.  Sometimes a deer would trigger one of them, but the deer usually stayed in the heavy brush near the river, a good half-mile east of the lane.  Other mantraps guarded the trail from the river to the house.  Monster Broadbeck had conceived, ordered, and installed the security system—the very system that had saved Jan’s life last night.

Jan parked the county vehicle in his driveway.  He leaned against the door and scanned the acreage before him where, some 115 years earlier, his great-grandfather homesteaded this brush patch along the muddy Big Horn River.  He came from Maryland via Colorado and the Jim Bridger Cutoff before he crossed the river where Dead Horse Gulch drained its meager oblation into it.  Jan’s great-grandfather, George Richardson, with his young wife and their five-year-old daughter, wintered the first year in a dugout near the river.  Jan imagined his great-grandfather gathering scrub brush for a fire and pondering why he had left Maryland to come to a place like this—a place where only trappers, Indians, and bushwhackers moved among the cottonwoods.

Richardson opened a store on a bluff six miles north of the ranch near where a ferry carried horses and men across the river and east to the mountains.  He built a home near the store, but retained ownership of the ranch.  He then opened the first bank in what became Basin City. Shortly thereafter Basin won a political fight with the tiny community of Otto, to become the county seat of the newly-formed Big Horn County.  That led the CB&Q railroad to build a line one block east of Richardson’s house.  Jan’s great-grandfather was firmly established as a Basin founding father when he died young on his kitchen table, attended by a physician trying desperately to force a breathing tube into his infected throat.

Richardson’s widow retained ownership of the ranch.  Jan’s mother eventually inherited the ranch during the Great Depression.  She spurned a scholarship to the University of Wyoming, married a bohunk from Nebraska, and birthed four children on the ranch.  As newlyweds, Jan’s parents lived in a log cabin with dirt floors.  They drew drinking water in a bucket from the Big Horn River.  Jan’s father eventually built a basement house, nothing more than a large cement cellar with a flat roof.  He dug the cistern, lined it with cement and ran a pipe to the kitchen.  Not much of a home, but Jan had been at peace in that basement with his parents, his older brother, and two older sisters. The original dugout had long since eroded away, given up along with fifty feet of riverbank to the incessant flooding of the Big Horn.  The river flooded every year, Jan’s father sandbagging the house and wading waist deep into the barnyard to rescue chickens and pigs. After World War II the federal government constructed the Boysen Reservoir, eighty miles upstream, saving the property from further destruction.

Jan’s mother had been forced to sell the ranch after his father left the family for greener pastures.  Fifty years later when Jan repurchased the place, he constructed a new log structure over the old cement walls of the original basement.  But the peace he had hoped to replicate on the ranch had morphed into a nightmare.

***

Stepping out of the county vehicle onto the driveway, Jan smelled the river and the odor of the horses in the corral.  The sun was now warming the June morning.  Across the river he saw an eagle perched on a dirt pinnacle, twisting its head as it surveyed its Dead Horse domain.  A casual observer would never spot him blending into the sandstone, but Jan knew the dark silhouette.

He walked over to the corral and threw some hay to Brutus, the big gelding paint, and Trudy, the small bay mare.  The ponies watched him with huge black eyes while they ground pungent stalks of hay with their big molars.  Jan stroked their powerful necks and drank in their smell.  They stepped gingerly back and forth as they watched him and chewed, hoping, Jan thought, that he would bridle them and ride along the river.

“Not today, kids,” he said.  “Your old man is too tired.  We had a big night, remember?  Hope you weren’t as scared as I was by the fireworks.”

He walked up the wooden steps to the house.  The screen was hanging by one hinge. The hardwood door was ruined.  Inside, he inspected the bedroom trashed from gunfire.  Window glass littered the entire room and the bed looked like someone had run a Rototiller over its surface.  Jan decided it was time to order the pillow top king-sized bed he had seen in Billings.  He would need a new bureau, and from the looks of the closet doors, a new wardrobe.

The far wall, constructed not out of logs but drywall, was destroyed.  Bullets had ripped the plasterboard from the two-by-fours and the entire wall would need to be replaced.  Surprisingly, only one computer monitor on the other side of the wall was shattered; at least three slugs had passed through the monitor before lodging in the exterior log wall.  The copier was missing a corner, but it made a perfect test copy when he tried it.  The Internet connection was operable.  All in all, it wasn’t too bad.

Then Jan saw the picture frame on the floor.  He froze.  Slowly he reached down and picked it up.  Turning it over, he saw that the glass was shattered and a bullet had pierced the picture exactly between Emma’s eyes.  Jan shook the remaining glass onto the floor and pulled the picture out of the frame.  With a pair of scissors he carefully cut a rectangle out of the center.  Holding the two-by three-inch segment by one corner, he looked at Emma.  Then he pulled out his wallet and placed the picture in the plastic pocket over his driver’s license.  From now on, when he opened his wallet for any reason, he would see Emma with the bullet hole in her face.

Back out on the porch, a warm morning breeze blew up.  Jan gazed at the concrete pad where the two-car garage had stood until Emma died there two years earlier.  A few burned timbers from the building were stacked to one side of the pad, reminders of the explosion that had been intended for him.  A wave of fresh grief washed over him, a sensation he experienced with increasing—instead of decreasing—frequency.  The shrink in Billings said that was a bad sign.  But he could not let go of the memories, as if doing so would somehow take Emma even further from him.

He stood frozen in place as the movie played in his mind—the front door slowly floating toward him into the kitchen, hinges flying in slow motion.  A coffee cup lazily floating upward, turning over, pouring its contents out, and drifting slowly down to shatter on the floor.  He could hear the explosion coming from the garage and could see, through the front door, timbers from the garage sailing in an arc, as though lofted by an unseen hand.  Two vehicles were on fire, his Jeep Cherokee was missing its roof and, of course, Emma was dead.  Her Nissan Sentra was blown ten feet outside what had been the wall of the garage.

A crazy cosmic flip-flop killed her instead of Jan.  The bomb was meant for him.  It was in his Jeep.  Their routine never varied: she left for her real estate office in her car while he cleaned up the breakfast dishes and got to his current writing project.  His Cherokee on most days sat alone in the garage unless he needed to run to town for office supplies or drive to a spot on the ranch for some chore or other.  But that morning Emma was to take his rig to work so he could take her car in for an oil change.  When she keyed the ignition to his Cherokee, she died.

He had known the moment he ran through the doorway toward the flaming garage that she was dead.