DALLAS CATES PACED the length of his former house with an angry stride while firing out occasional air punches and mumbling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck …” His route was so familiar to him he could have done it with his eyes closed: from the front door, through the living room, into and out of the kitchen, and into the back mudroom until he reached the door. Then spinning on his boot heel and doing it again.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck …”
As he did it, Cates recalled episodes of his boyhood when he’d paced the same route before or during significant events in his life. He remembered doing it as a freshman in high school while wearing a wrestling team singlet, psyching himself up to take on the varsity wrestler in his weight class, which he did. Then again, two years later, as he prepared to win his first state championship in wrestling. He recalled nervously pacing a year later as he waited for the local cops to show up because of that sexual assault claim that had been made by a female hanger-on who had accused the entire wrestling squad.
He’d done the same routine in cowboy boots and chaps the day before winning the local rodeo and qualifying for his Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association card, and again when he had to win a go-round to get into the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.
Back then, Eldon and Brenda had sat passively in their recliners watching him pace and shaking their heads. Eldon shook his head because he thought Dallas was wasting his energy. Brenda shook her head because she was just so darned proud of her youngest boy.
*
THIS TIME, THOUGH, Cates was cursing himself for the epic screwup an hour before. He was especially angry that it had been his fault, and his fault alone. He’d been so concerned that Bobbi would mess up and let a vehicle cruise through the main gate without alerting him, or that LOR’s aiming scheme would give them a false reading, or that Soledad would do something stupid and impulsive, that he hadn’t paid enough attention himself to that ridiculous overhanging branch that had altered the trajectory of the shooting head.
Had that Barney Fife in the sheriff’s department vehicle actually seen them leaving the scene?
And had the shooting head, although slightly diverted, done fatal damage to that bastard of a judge?
*
CATES WAS SO consumed by his anger and self-recriminations that he almost didn’t notice that Bobbi Johnson had entered the house through the mudroom door and now stood quietly with her back against the wall inside the living room. She watched him pace for a while, but he had no doubt she had come in there for a reason, that she had something she felt she needed to say.
“What?” he finally asked, putting his hands on his hips and glaring at her. He was out of breath from exertion.
“Dallas, I …” Her voice faded out. Or her nerve.
“What? Spit it out.”
“Dallas, you need to get control of Axel before he gets us all arrested or killed.”
“What about him?” Cates asked, momentarily confused. He hadn’t even seen Axel since they’d returned to the compound and all of them had gone their separate ways with their own separate thoughts about what had just happened.
“Have you been in the bedroom?” she asked, chinning toward the closed door of what had been Eldon and Brenda’s room.
“No.”
“That couple last night, they’re in there. They’re dead. He shot them in the head this morning. Unless it was you who did it.”
“It wasn’t me,” Cates said. “I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but no, it wasn’t me.”
“Did you know about it?”
“Not until it was over.”
Tears formed in Johnson’s eyes and she swiped at them angrily with the back of her hand. “We’re in too deep, Dallas. I’m in too deep.”
“It’ll be fine, Bobbi,” he said as he moved in close to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Believe me, it’ll all be fine. We’re going to get to the end of this and no one will suspect a thing. Nobody’s going to arrest us or hurt you.”
She melted into him and buried her head in his chest. He wished she wouldn’t cry like that. He wished she was tougher.
“I did my job this morning,” she sobbed. “I called you the minute that guy came through the gate.”
“You did your job,” he said. “None of it was your fault. I’m the one who screwed up. Not you, not LOR, and not Axel.”
As he’d paced through the house, he replayed the events of that morning over and over in his mind, wondering if he should have made different decisions.
Should he have just held off firing the shooting head and waited for another shot the next morning? That had flashed through his mind at the time, but he’d rejected it. Not with the laser point on Hewitt’s face and the revolver coming out.
What if, instead of telling Axel to get the hell out of there, he had waited for the deputy to show up and taken him out? He could have possibly created two grizzly bear fatalities at the same location. Then he could have finished the job on the judge with the bat. But Dallas had rejected that scenario as well. For one, the tanks couldn’t have been recharged in time for a second strike. Second, if the deputy had called for backup before he arrived at the scene, that could have been a catastrophe for them as well.
No, it all came down to not seeing that goddamned branch in the dark. And the unlucky break it had been that the deputy just happened to show up at exactly the wrong time.
Cates was ninety-five percent sure the judge was dead. He’d not only felt the power of the crushing mechanical bite through the metal arm of the telescopic scissor jib, but he’d glimpsed the still body of Judge Hewitt on the cart path. There had been a lot of blood. The grizzly bear teeth in the steel jaws were crimson with it.
“We don’t need him,” Johnson said, pulling him out of his musings. She was back to Axel. “We were doing just fine before he showed up. I mean, I know why you have to keep LOR around. I fucking hate him, but he can fix the Zeus II machine if it breaks down. But Axel? What good is he to you? To us? He’s a loose cannon.
“I mean, he just killed those two people in there,” she said. “What if somebody misses them and shows up? Will he just kill them, too?”
Probably, Cates thought but didn’t say out loud. She didn’t even know about what had happened to the attendant in Thermopolis.
“I mean, what are we going to do with those bodies?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about that. I grew up here on this property and I know there are places to hide bodies where they’ll never be found. My mom …” he said, but let it trail off. There was no need to get into those stories now.
She asked, “What if those people in there had a meeting in town and they don’t show up for it? Wouldn’t that raise suspicions? What do we do if one of their cell phones ring?”
“Those are good questions,” Cates said. “My only answer is that the only way to avoid those problems is to work faster than I’d planned. Speed everything up so we can get out of here before any of that happens. We’ll go see your sister,” he said, having no intention of ever doing that.
“He’s going to screw everything up,” she said. “I don’t trust him and he scares the shit out of me. Do you trust him?”
“I don’t trust anyone except you,” Cates said soothingly. Which was a lie, of course. He didn’t trust her, either. “I’ll tell you something I learned in prison, though. When the situation turns all raggedy-assed, it never hurts to have somebody crazier than you on your side. That can freeze your enemies in place.”
She said, “He’s a psycho. I thought LOR was bad, but he’s not on the same level as Axel.”
“Maybe that’s what we need for the time being,” Cates said. “Someone so unpredictable and ruthless that they’ll think twice about coming after us.”
“Axel isn’t worth all that,” she said. “I’m afraid he’ll turn you against me. He wants new recruits for his stupid plan.”
“Impossible,” Cates said, squeezing her. He nuzzled his face into her and wished her hair smelled better. While he did, he contemplated that, within the group, Soledad wanted Bobbi gone, Bobbi wanted Soledad gone now and LOR gone as soon as possible, and LOR wanted to go home to Jeffrey City and be rid of them all the minute his obligation was fulfilled. And how he held all the cards for the moment on not only keeping them all together, but completing his goal. He was grateful he was a natural leader of men—and women. But it couldn’t last forever. He was grateful Johnson couldn’t see his smile while he held her.
Then, looking up, Cates said, “Where is Axel, anyway?”
“He’s gone,” she said. “I saw him driving away in that dead couple’s car a few minutes after we got back.”
“Really? I wonder where he went.”
“Let’s hope he never comes back,” she said. “It would be all right with me if he just kept driving.”
“Maybe he went to get breakfast,” Cates said.
Johnson gently pushed away from Cates. She seemed reassured by him, and no longer at a breaking point. She caressed Cates’s left hand, but he flinched when her thumb made contact with the fresh X tattoo that filled box number four of his kill list. He’d made it using a needle and ink from a ballpoint pen.
“Just three more,” she said.
“Just three more,” he echoed.
“Please don’t tell him what we talked about,” she said.
“You mean, what you talked about,” Cates said with a chuckle, to confuse her.
“I mean, you have to agree with me, right? That we need to cut him loose as soon as we can?”
Cates whispered, “When the time is right.”
“Isn’t it right now?”
“Not yet,” he said, noting movement outside through the living room window. He let go of her and brushed the curtain back. Soledad was behind the wheel of the dead couple’s white SUV and he drove it into the open garage and parked it.
“Speak of the devil,” Cates said.
*
AXEL SOLEDAD GLIDED through the front door on his crutches, grasping a large greasy paper bag with BURG-O-PARDNER printed on the outside of it. Like a sniffing puppy, LOR appeared behind him.
“I got us some food,” he announced.
“Good, because I’m starved,” LOR said.
“I haven’t had a good breakfast sandwich from the Burg-O-Pardner for a long time,” Cates said.
They all gravitated toward the kitchen table, even Johnson. Soledad placed the bag on the tabletop.
“Is that it?” Cates asked Soledad, wondering if the man would offer more information on his recent whereabouts.
“I also got us coffees,” Soledad said, choosing not to understand Cates’s real question. “I couldn’t carry it all in one trip.”
“I’ve got it,” Cates said, going outside and walking toward the white SUV. He hadn’t noticed before that it still had California plates.
Inside the vehicle, Cates found the box filled with lidded coffees on the front passenger seat. The interior smelled of fried food, hot coffee, and something acrid. He recognized the smell of gunpowder.
As Cates leaned over to pick up the box, he noticed two small brass casings on the driver’s-side floor mat. And before he closed the car door with a bump from his right hip, he saw a semiautomatic .22 rifle laying across the rear bench seat.
*
HE TURNED TO find Soledad in front of him. Cates marveled once again how swiftly—and how silently—the man covered ground.
“I’m sure you saw the rifle,” Soledad said.
Cates nodded.
“When we got back from the club this morning, I got to thinking. We left that golf course in such a damned hurry. I know it couldn’t be helped under the circumstances.”
“Yes.”
“So we had no time to finish the job properly, and we didn’t have time to cover our tracks. And when I say cover our tracks, I mean exactly that.”
Cates felt a chill go through him. Not only were there probably tire tracks from Johnson’s pickup in the soft mulch, but he’d walked around in the alcove himself.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck …” he whispered.
Soledad said, “Don’t worry about it, Dallas. We’re golden.”
“But how? Did you go back to the club?”
“Of course not,” Soledad said. “I figured the place was crawling with cops. So I borrowed a rifle from our California friends and took their car into town. Let’s just say I created a diversion serious enough to pull all those cops straight off the golf course.”
Soledad said, “Random violence screws them up, and they run around like chickens with their heads chopped off. I know about this from experience in the field. If you want to create an absolute clusterfuck, you do something with no motive, no rhyme or reason.
“The cops will start with the victim and work out from there. Who was she? Did she have enemies? Is there some kind of gang war going on at the school? Did the shooter have another target in mind? Those are the questions they’ll ask. Then they’ll chase their tails around like puppies and get absolutely nowhere fast. But what they won’t do,” Soledad said, “is think to go back to the original crime scene right away.”
“She?” Cates said. “The school?”
“I’ll give you all the details later,” he said with a cold smile. “Just be happy that it worked like a charm.”
As Cates started to put it together with equal measures of horror and admiration, Soledad said, “We’ll need to get back up to the club tonight and take a couple of rakes. Then we can finish this thing in one fell swoop and get the hell out of Wyoming.”