Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(87)
With a hard torque of his wrist, Nate twisted Kapelow’s ear off and the man screamed. Twin pulses of blood sprayed across the concrete floor from the side of Kapelow’s head. His detached ear hung uselessly by thin strings of sinew.
“That bird flew here to warn me,” Nate said as he switched hands and grabbed Kaplow’s right ear. “Where is your keycard?”
“Back pocket,” the sheriff howled. “Back pocket.”
Nate let the pressure off and rolled Kapelow over to his belly. He found the card for the cell door in the man’s jeans. After he did, he stood up. The sheriff moaned and bent his knees into a fetal position while he covered his detached ear with his hands.
Nate reached over the open half door and inserted the card into the door lock. It released with a click and he pushed it open.
“You’re lucky I let you off easy,” he said to Kapelow.
Before he strode down the hallway into the lobby, Nate ducked back into the cell and retrieved the body of the peregrine. It deserved a dignified burial.
Nate detached a first-aid kit from the hallway wall and tossed it into the cell. Then he slammed the cell door shut on Kapelow, kicked the weapons aside, and found his .454 Casull in the evidence room.
*
NATE ROARED INTO the yard of his home in Kapelow’s stolen SUV and he knew instantly that Liv and Kestrel had been taken.
Their Yarak, Inc. van was parked in the open garage and the lights were on inside. The front door gaped open.
When Loren Jean Hill tried to explain that she’d been forced to call Liv home or the man would have her brother killed, Nate swung his pistol through the air and hit her on the side of her head with the long barrel and she dropped like a sack of cement.
For good measure, he stormed through every room of the house to confirm that no one else was there. Then he filled a small canvas duffel with .454 ammunition, binoculars, rope, gloves, a jacket, and two skinning knives.
The man from the cartel who’d taken his wife and daughter had an hour head start on him, possibly two. There was no way the kidnapper could know Nate had broken out of jail and was coming after him.
Nate abandoned Kapelow’s SUV and tossed the duffel bag onto the passenger seat of his old Jeep Wrangler that he’d kept in a shed. He knew it would start because even though he rarely drove it, he’d kept it maintained and ready to go.
As he sped up the gravel road away from his house toward the highway, Nate thumped the steering wheel angrily with the heel of his hand.
He’d let this happen, he thought. Against his better judgment, he’d gone along. He’d put his family in danger by trying to be more like Joe—to trust that the system would be fair.
No more.
Going back on the grid, marrying Liv, and fathering a daughter had not changed the facts on the ground. There were still more Sheriff Kapelows out there than Joe Picketts. Nate’s mission had always been to even the odds. Now, though, there were more innocent lives at stake. And it was his responsibility to save them.
When he approached the highway, he knew which direction to turn:
South.
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWO DAYS LATER, JOE NUDGED ROJO THROUGH A STAND OF closely packed aspen as he worked his way up the mountain. Rojo’s steel shoes crunched on the bed of fallen golden leaves as more leaves fluttered down through the air around them. It was a cold morning, the first freeze of the fall, although the intense midmorning sun was softening the ground as it rose behind him in the west.
Following Joe up the mountain on horseback were Mike Martin and Eddie Smith from the Jackson office. They’d responded immediately to Joe’s call, dropped what they were doing, and driven through the night to Saddlestring towing a horse trailer.
The three horsemen were a truncated version of the newly maligned Predator Attack Team, although this time they weren’t going after a killer grizzly. They were hunting a doctor.
*
AFTER THIRTY-SIX HOURS and alerts across the states of Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, there had been no sighting of Dr. Arthur’s unique Ford Raptor with the dr tom plates. It wasn’t until Candy Croswell revealed, almost as an aside, that he’d recently closed on a remote mountain cabin on the back side of Wolf Mountain a few weeks before, that they knew where to go. She hadn’t been there, she said. Once she’d found out it didn’t have plumbing or electricity, she’d been reminded of her time in Alaska and said she’d had no desire even to see it.
A quick title search by Marybeth of the Twelve Sleep County Assessor’s Office provided the exact geographical coordinates of the place—known almost immediately to her and Joe as “Dr. Tom’s Cabin”—and she located it on Google Earth.
Joe had been in the remote area a few times checking elk hunters, and he knew the cabin wasn’t easy to get to or sneak up on. The only access was a weedy two-track that meandered through the pines and literally ended in a mountain meadow. On the edge of the meadow, with its back end in the wall of timber, was the cabin Tom Arthur had purchased.
Because it would be an all-day journey even to get there to check it out, Joe had asked Martin to send the Lifeseeker unit over the mountains to do a sweep. The pilot reported that he’d picked up a brief cell phone signal in the vicinity of the cabin location, but that it was just a few seconds long, as if the owner of the cell phone had turned it on just long enough to search for a cell signal—which was unavailable—before punching it off again.