Dark Sky (Joe Pickett #21)(61)

It took him a few seconds to get his wind back, and Joe sat up and grasped his bent knees with his arms.

“Are you okay?” Price asked. “Where do we go?”

“Don’t talk,” Joe said, aware that they could probably both be heard by the Thomases on the other side of the cabin.

As he said it, a dark form emerged from the corner of the cabin and separated from the structure. Joe could see him only because his body blocked the starlight on the snow in the immediate distance.

The unidentified man walked silently and with caution. He was no doubt hunting down the source of the noise from the back of the cabin.

Joe searched for the .22 and realized he’d landed on it. He was able to roll his butt cheek and extract the rifle just as the form turned toward them. He hoped the muzzle wasn’t jammed with soil from being tossed outside. Joe didn’t aim but generally pointed the muzzle of the rifle to center of mass.

The sharp crack of the shot illuminated Kirby’s surprised face for less than a second. He was just ten feet away.

Kirby said, “Ow,” and turned away. But he didn’t go down.

“Go,” Joe barked to Price. He knew he couldn’t see well enough to reload, and he didn’t know how badly Kirby was hit.

Joe rolled to his feet and joined Price, who was running wildly ahead of him through the snow toward a dark wall of timber.

“Where are we going?” Price asked over his shoulder.

“Just run,” Joe said, trying to keep up.

There was a heavy boom from behind them, followed by two more. Joe heard a rifle round smack into a tree trunk to his right. The impact sent a shower of snow cascading down all around him from branches that had been cradling it. Within a few steps, they were in black timber.

As he ran, sidling around trees and trying not to trip over downed logs or exposed roots, Joe recalled what his middle daughter, April, had said to him a year before when she came to visit him in his hospital bed:

You need to quit getting shot.





Tuesday


   Slippery Son of a Bitch


        A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

    —Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain





NINETEEN


At 2:45 in the morning, Marybeth parked her van in front of Sheriff Scott Tibbs’s rental home on South Nebraska Street and killed the engine. She was furious.

Sheridan sat in the passenger seat, her face illuminated by the glow of the screen on her phone.

“Do you want to come in?” Marybeth asked.

“No, I’ll wait out here unless you need me. Maybe I can get some more intel on Steve-2.”

“I shouldn’t be long.”

Marybeth kept the van running so it would stay warm inside and left Sheridan in it with her device.

While driving there, she’d noted that the digital temperature gauge on the dashboard read twenty degrees. It was unseasonably cold out, and she could only guess how much colder it was in the mountains. She knew Joe had packed winter clothing and gear—he always did, no matter the month in Wyoming—but he couldn’t have fully prepared for this kind of weather. It wasn’t even winter yet.

Light snow fell and haloed around the streetlamp on the corner. It was the only light on for the entire block, although there was a dull glow behind the curtains in one of Tibbs’s windows.

She strode up the broken walkway and rang the doorbell. It chimed inside, but she couldn’t hear any activity. So she banged on the aluminum storm door with her gloved fist and it made an impressive-sounding racket.

“Sheriff Tibbs, I need to talk to you.”

A minute later, she saw the curtain shimmy from the room with the light on. Someone had peered out to see who was at the door. Then she heard shuffling inside.

Finally, a bolt was thrown from the inside and the door cracked open a few inches. Tibbs was short and stout and he sported a thick white mustache that obscured his upper lip. He had deep-set brown eyes and his uncombed hair stuck straight out to the side a few inches from over his left ear. He was bald, and she realized she’d never seen him without his comb-over. He was dressed in an oversized white T-shirt and red flannel pajama bottoms. His bare feet were nearly as wide as they were long on the hardwood floor. They looked like paddles.

Tibbs stepped out onto the threshold and eased the door partly shut behind him while he pushed at the storm door with a quizzical expression on his face.

“Mrs. Pickett,” he said in a slow western drawl. “What can I do you for?”

“You can answer your phone, for one thing.”

“What?”

“I’ve left half a dozen messages for you at your office today. You didn’t call me back. Then your receptionist gave me your county cell phone number, and it went straight to a recording that said you hadn’t set up your mailbox yet. I’ve sent you four texts and two emails. Since you didn’t respond to any of them, I didn’t have much choice but to come over here and roust you.”

Tibbs rubbed his face and then his eyes. “It’s pretty late,” he said.

“I know that.”

“It’s a good thing my wife is away,” he said. “She doesn’t like being awakened in the middle of the night.”