DALLAS CATES AND Axel Soledad lounged in the far corner of the deep end of the indoor hot springs mineral pool while wisps of slightly sulfur-smelling steam rose from the water. Gentle waves lapped at them, the disturbance emanating from the splashing of a young American Indian family in the shallow end. Cates could barely make them out through the steam, their forms rendered into shadowy outlines. A young mother and her four- or five-year-old twins. A boy and a girl. The girl was shrill and her cries cut right through the stillness of the late afternoon.
Thermopolis, or “Thermop,” as Wyoming residents called it, had fewer than three thousand people. Its claim to fame was the large volume of geothermal water that came out of the ground and filled a number of public and private pool facilities. Hellie’s Tepee Pools, where Cates and Soledad were located, was a large geodesic dome-like structure with diving boards and a curved plastic waterslide and very few visitors this time of day.
Thermopolis was only one hundred and thirty-eight miles southwest of Saddlestring over the top of the Bighorn Mountains. Legend had it that it took “twelve sleeps” for the Native American Indians to make the trek on foot and horseback, thus the eventual name of Twelve Sleep County.
The drive would be less than three hours in Bobbi Johnson’s vehicle.
*
BECAUSE SOUND CARRIED across the water in the indoor facility, both men spoke in whispers.
“She doesn’t like me, I don’t think,” Soledad said.
“Who, Bobbi?”
“Yeah, Bobbi.”
“She doesn’t like anyone,” Cates said. “Especially not LOR.”
“That’s obvious. If those two got in a knife fight, I’d bet on her.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t think she likes this whole deal,” Soledad said, using his chin to sweep around the facility to include them all. “She doesn’t like sharing you with me, and especially not LOR, for that matter.”
“She’ll get through it,” Cates said. “She doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“That’s harsh,” Soledad chuckled.
“It is, but it’s true.”
“She won’t talk, will she? Do you trust her to keep her mouth shut?”
Cates filled his cupped hands with warm water and raised them over his head to soak himself. As he smoothed down his hair, he said, “Bobbi knows what would happen if she turned on me. On us. Plus, she knows she’s implicated. She’ll keep her mouth shut.”
“You know her better than I do,” Soledad said.
Cates shrugged. “I don’t know her all that well, but I know people like her. I just spent the last few years with them.”
“Where did you find her?”
“She found me,” Cates said with a snort. “She sent me a bunch of letters when I was in Rawlins. It kind of escalated from there.”
“She likes bad boys, I guess.”
“She doesn’t like you, though,” Cates said, and Soledad agreed.
*
BOBBI JOHNSON ALSO apparently didn’t like the mineral water. She sat in a lounge chair in a rented one-piece swimsuit, looking at her phone.
A few minutes before, Cates had seen LOR, in his bright orange rental suit and flip-flops, try to sit next to her. She’d told him to fuck off loud enough that the mother tried to cover the ears of her children and she held them tightly for a moment. Only when LOR sulked away to an indoor picnic table a hundred feet away did the mother usher her children out of the pool area.
Cates and Soledad looked up when they realized someone was hovering over them. It was the attendant, a ginger-haired teenager with problem acne wearing a Hellie’s polo and red Converse tennis shoes. He was the one who had sold them tickets to enter, as well as rented swimsuits to them all, which Soledad had paid for in cash.
“This is just to let you guys know that we close the pool at five in the winter months.”
“It’s winter?” Cates asked.
“Technically, our winter season starts in October,” the attendant said. “So in twenty-five minutes, it’ll close.”
“Gotcha,” Cates replied.
But the attendant lingered.
“Something I can help you with?” Cates asked finally.
The attendant shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “You’re Dallas Cates, aren’t you?”
Cates and Soledad exchanged looks, then Cates said, “Dallas who?”
The attendant laughed like he was in on the joke. “I remember seeing you on TV. My dad is a great rodeo fan—he used to rope in college. We watch every minute of the national finals every year, and since you’re from Wyoming …”
When Cates didn’t respond, the attendant said, “Don’t worry. We get celebrities here. It’s no big thing. Last summer, Carrot Top was here. You know, the comedian? He was right here in the same pool you guys are in.”
“Imagine that,” Soledad said. “Carrot Top.”
“Swear to God,” the attendant said. “We also had the host of a TV game show. Wink or Blink Something. I can’t remember his last name.” Then: “Wait until I tell my dad I met Dallas Cates.”
After the attendant skipped away, Soledad asked, “Does this happen often to you?”
“More often than I’d hoped,” Cates said.
*
AXEL SOLEDAD WAS a strange and enigmatic creature, Cates thought. Since Axel’s arrival in Jeffrey City, Cates had been trying to figure him out. All he knew about the man was from messages they’d sent back and forth to each other while Cates was in prison.
Cates clearly remembered the first message he’d received out of the blue:
My name is Axel. We are destined to be friends because I know we have common enemies.
Cates had waited days to reply. He had good reasons to be suspicious. The message could be from a crank, from a troll, or even from a CO trying to set him up. Inmates weren’t allowed to communicate with anyone from the outside without approval, and he knew he should fully expect the conversation to be monitored or recorded. But Soledad’s initial message had come through an illicit and obscure chat site on the prison library’s computer, which was supposed to filter out that kind of interaction.
Finally, Cates had written back.
Tell me more about yourself. And who are these common enemies?
*
THE CORRESPONDENCE WENT on for months. Cates found out that the app was engineered to delete their communications a few minutes after they’d been read by the other party, so there was no thread and no digital record of the exchange. And it appeared that the communication channel was one-on-one, with no other participants involved. Soledad had explained that he was the designer of the app, and that he’d built it solely to talk to Cates.
Cates had become comfortable with Axel Soledad, whoever he actually was. He’d tested him several times to find out if Soledad was in contact with the COs by claiming he planned to break out on a certain date and how he was going to do it. When there was no reaction on that day by the officers, Cates had confessed to Soledad what he’d done. Soledad had replied that he’d have done the same thing in that situation, no hard feelings.
*
OVER THE MONTHS of electronic communications, Soledad had tried to get Cates to buy into his ideology. It was something about taking down the deep state that had betrayed him while he was in a special military unit overseas, serving what he later found out was a pack of self-interested liars in Washington, blah-blah-blah.
To strike back, Soledad had begun a movement that manipulated parties already at each other’s throats in already-broken American cities and encouraged violent riots and unrest. He did so by arming members of the homeless, destitute, oppressed, and forgotten and urging them to rise up against local governments.
It had all been going according to plan, until …
Blah-blah-blah, Cates thought.
He was bored by it all, and only read Soledad’s long diatribes because it was something to do. None of that stuff interested him. What happened in cities had never interested him, especially since all the racial enmity could plainly be seen throughout the cell blocks of the prison. What did interest him, though, was the possibility of aligning with a brilliant mind with a common goal.
Which was why, Soledad had explained, he’d researched Dallas Cates and figured out a way to reach him.
*
DALLAS CATES HAD outlined his story because Soledad kept prompting him to do so. Even as he did it, Cates had the suspicion that Soledad already knew the details.
He’d started at the beginning, growing up as the youngest brother of three on the family property outside of Saddlestring that served as the headquarters for Dull Knife Outfitters and C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service. His parents were Eldon and Brenda, third-generation blue-collar locals from the county. Later, a sign at the gate was added that the property was also the birthplace of PRCA World Champion Cowboy Dallas Cates.
The older Cates brothers, Bull and Timber, were bigger, duller, and more brutish than Dallas, who was a star athlete and the unabashed favorite of his mother, Brenda, who had also conceived of and hung the birthplace sign. His mother was his biggest cheerleader and fan, and she hadn’t believed any of the sexual assault rumors about her youngest son, and especially not those involving the game warden’s middle daughter, April.
When those allegations surfaced, the Cates family circled the wagons around Dallas, starting a cycle of incidents and misunderstandings that escalated far beyond anyone’s expectations.
Even though it was later proven that Dallas hadn’t assaulted April, that hadn’t stopped his persecutors.
Timber and Bull were eventually killed, and Bull’s wife, Cora Lee, was, too. Eldon had broken his neck when he was shoved into a deep hole, and Brenda became a quadriplegic. She was eventually sentenced to the Wyoming Women’s Center in Lusk.
Dallas had been convicted of trumped-up charges at the height of his rodeo career, in the same year that he had won $243,187 in saddle bronc competitions and was destined once again to lead in the standings going into the NFR in Las Vegas.
While in prison, Cates had been denied permission to visit Brenda during her last days on earth, while at the same time the family property had gone into receivership for nonpayment of the mortgage and accrued property taxes that were well beyond what Dallas could accumulate in prison.
But his tormentors—the people who had banded together to destroy him and his family and seize their property—were still out there. Those self-righteous, smug bastards. Something Brenda had once told him would forever stick in his mind. She’d said, “It don’t matter what you’ve done in your life. They will always think of us as white trash.”
The judge. The local sheriff. The county prosecutor. The game warden. That falconer and his wife. Winner came along later, but he was of the same mindset.
Soledad had listened to it all, then he’d asked a question: “Do you understand what a Venn diagram is?”
Cates had confessed that he didn’t.
“A Venn diagram is a representation that shows the logical relation between names, words, or symbols. You put all those items up on a board and then you draw circles around the ones that create a common set.”
“Okay,” Cates had written back.
“In the Venn diagram representing Dallas Cates and Axel Soledad and the people who screwed them over and ruined their lives, there is a set of names that overlap.”
Soledad had then gone on to detail the specific set that contained the names Dulcie Schalk, Joe Pickett, and Nate Romanowski and his wife.
“Where we don’t overlap is the sheriff in your case and a person named Geronimo Jones in mine,” Soledad wrote.
“The sheriff is dead,” Cates wrote. “But the others are still out there.”
“And in my case,” Soledad said, “Geronimo Jones is still very much alive. The last time I saw him was after he and Joe Pickett practically blew my legs off with shotguns and left me to bleed out in the dirt in downtown Portland. If it wasn’t for an activist who happened by who believed in my mission and drove me to an underground clinic, I wouldn’t be here today. But that really set me back, and it set back our cause.”
“Our cause?” Cates had asked.
“There are a lot of guys with me. They’re lying low now, waiting for me to activate them. Then we can finish what I started.”
He explained that there were sleeper agents all across the country, but especially in the South, Mountain West, and Texas. They were people no one would suspect.
“I’m talking leading community members, more than a few politicians, and even some cops,” Soledad said. “We’re all pissed off and we’re in position.”
“Are you talking about this ‘taking down Washington’ thing again?” Cates asked.
“Yes. The political atmosphere isn’t what it was a couple of years ago, but the rage is still there. As long as the spooks are running everything for their own best interests …”
And Cates heard, blah-blah-blah.
*
“SO WHAT YOU’RE saying,” Cates had finally ventured, “is that we work together on eliminating the common names. Then you can restart your little war.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t hate our country enough, though,” Cates said. “I kind of like it. I don’t get involved with politics.”
“You don’t have to,” Soledad assured him. “I’ll take care of that. And I don’t hate our country. I hate our leaders and the elites who don’t have accountability. But when we’re through with this, maybe you’ll think highly enough of me to help me out with Mr. Jones.”
“Maybe,” Cates said. “But figuring out how to do it is another thing. I’m afraid they’ll see me coming.”
“I believe we’ll come up with something,” Soledad replied. “Something they’ll never suspect until it’s too late.”
Cates had agreed with that.
“There’s one thing you should know,” Soledad said.
“What’s that?”
“When I mentioned that I had people with me. They’re in some surprising places.”
“Are you saying you have someone on the inside?”
Soledad didn’t reply. Cates wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.
*
CATES WAS A little surprised by Soledad’s actual arrival in Jeffrey City. His physical appearance was divided into halves. His upper body was strong and fit and imposing. He had a shaved scalp and a five-day growth of dark beard, as well as a large bladelike nose and piercing dark eyes. Like Cates’s, Soledad’s arms were festooned with tattoos. Only, in Soledad’s case, all of the art was devoted to falcons and falconry.
Soledad’s lower half was that of an eighty- or ninety-year-old man. His legs were thin and spindly, and his boots often splayed out to the sides as he glided along using braces that strapped around his forearms and extended on tubular legs to the ground.
Later, Soledad showed Cates that one of the braces contained a hidden eighteen-inch stiletto, and the other a razor-sharp flexible steel garrote that could behead a man in seconds. He’d had them custom-made, he said.
*
“HOW LONG DO you plan to keep LOR around?” Soledad asked Cates.
Soledad was propped up in the corner of the pool, his elbows splayed out on the lip of the painted concrete wall, while his legs were suspended uselessly below him in the murky water. His two aluminum braces were stacked on the deck within reach.
Cates shrugged. “Until we can get that machine right. He’s the only one who understands how it all works, since he built it in the first place. I want it to operate like a Swiss watch.”
Soledad reluctantly agreed.
“I didn’t like it when we almost missed the first time with that CO,” Cates said. “That could have been a fucking disaster. It hit high and to the right. Another couple of inches and we could have missed that guy altogether. We need a way of sighting in that shooting head better, like a red-dot sight or something. As it is, we’re making a big guess when we pull the trigger.”
“It worked with that lady lawyer,” Soledad said.
“Yeah, but that was pure luck. I was guessing distance and impact. It helped that she leaned into the jaws at the last second.
“I think we need to buy some watermelons at the grocery store to practice on,” Cates said. “Do you think they have watermelons here?”
“Probably not this time of year,” Soledad said. “Not in Thermopolis, Wyoming.”
“Cantaloupes might work,” Cates said. “They’re about the right size. I’d bet they have cantaloupes in that store.”
“Maybe,” Soledad agreed.
Then the lights blinked on and off twice.
“It must be closing time,” Cates said.
“Let me go talk to the attendant,” Soledad said. “Maybe I can get him to extend our time, given you’re such a celebrity and all.”
Cates watched as Soledad launched himself out of the pool using his impressive upper body strength, then gathered up his braces and glided toward the front office.
LOR made his way to the men’s locker room to change, and Johnson made her way to the women’s.
*
CATES WAS TOWELING off when Soledad rejoined him. The man could cover ground quite quickly with his braces, faster than if he walked.
“What’d he say?” Cates asked.
“He didn’t say much,” Soledad said while he removed the stiletto from his left crutch and cleaned the blood off the blade with a used towel. Then: “You might consider wearing some kind of disguise when we go buy the fruit. Too many people seem to know you in this state.”
*
ON THE WAY out of the facility, Cates passed by the ticket booth and looked at his reflection in the window. Johnson and LOR had already gone out to the truck.
He did look good now that he had his belt buckle back, he thought. That Winner son of a bitch had hidden it in his underwear drawer and it had taken a while to find it.
The lights were shut off in the office, but he could see the soles of a pair of red Converse sneakers sticking out from beneath the counter.
“One good thing about these small towns,” Soledad said, “there’s not so many cameras. But even with that being the case, I suggest we skip town and go buy that fruit in Worland or Buffalo. Let’s get out of town before someone starts looking for your rodeo fan.”
Cates slowly turned around in the passageway next to the ticket booth to take in Axel Soledad, who was behind him. Soledad winked at him as he glided by on his braces. Now Cates understood much, much more about his new traveling companion. The man was strategic, pragmatic, and absolutely ruthless.
And that the two of them might, in fact, fulfill their common cause and wipe out that Venn diagram together.