Breaking Point

DAY THREE
9

Early the next morning, Dave Farkus awoke from a dream about someone pounding on his door to realize that, yes, someone was pounding on his door. And when someone pounded on the door, the entire twelve-by-sixty-foot single-wide trailer-perched on cinder blocks and sheathed in peeling sheet metal-shook as if it were coming apart at the rivets. He could even hear dishes tinkling in the cupboards above the sink.

“Hold on, goddamnit!” he shouted. “I’m coming, I’m coming. .”

Farkus threw back the covers and the stray black cat that slept on his bed screeched and ran for the closet. He stood up, spine popping like a muffled series of demolitions, and rubbed his face with his hands. Pulling on a pilled pair of sweats and a T-shirt, he slid his feet into a pair of cowboy boots and staggered down the narrow hallway past the bathroom, using the walls on both sides for balance.

Dave Farkus was fifty-seven and pear-shaped with rheumy eyes, jowls, thick muttonchop sideburns, and a bulbous nose. His top left incisor had a thin slot in it from biting off fishing line. He glanced at the digital clock over the stove. It was 6:29. He wondered who would be out and about so early. In his experience, if someone knocked on his door before seven or after nine at night, trouble of some kind was waiting on the porch.

He could see a bulky silhouette through the louvered slat windows of the metal front door. The silhouette was wearing a cowboy hat, and Farkus thought, They’ve come for me.

The trailer Farkus rented sat on an acre of sagebrush south of town, with a view of the municipal dump on one side and a gravel pit on the other. Someone had once attempted to plant a garden outside but had never progressed beyond making a rectangular outline in the dirt with river rocks. A 1953 Chevrolet pickup without an engine was propped up on its rims on the side of the trailer. Over the years, the trailer had settled so it listed slightly to the south. The high-altitude sun had faded the curtains to the point that they looked like parchment paper. The Formica tabletop was scarred with cigarette burns from a previous owner, and the floors were permanently gritty. But it had a satellite dish!

“Who is it?”

“Sheriff Kyle McLanahan,” the silhouette said, with a deep western twang.

“I ain’t done nothing recently,” Farkus said. “Besides, you ain’t the sheriff anymore.”

Farkus heard a heavy sigh. Then: “Just open the door. We’ve got something to talk about.”

“It’s awful early.”

“What-you’ve got to do your yoga? Open up, Farkus.”

He hesitated. He’d been renting the single-wide for five months from a woman bartender at the Stockman’s Bar who had moved in with a local realtor. Too much of her stuff was still in boxes in the closet, even though she’d promised, over and over, to retrieve them. Farkus had told her he wouldn’t pay the five-hundred-dollar rent that month until she cleared her things out. So had she hired the ex-sheriff to shake him down?

Or was it because of Ardith, his ex-wife, who demanded alimony payments even though she knew he’d lost his job? Had Ardith sent McLanahan to collect?

Or maybe he was serving as the debt collector for Bighorn Fly Shop? Coming for the cash Farkus owed or the three-hundred dollars’ worth of natural cock ringneck pheasant skins, mallard flank wood duck sides, and peacock eyes he planned to use to tie flies to sell to tourists and local yokels? Farkus had once seen McLanahan loitering around in the Bighorn Fly Shop, he recalled. So maybe Travis, the owner, had sent the ex-sheriff along to collect.

Farkus said, “I had no idea hackles cost so damned much these days on account of all the women braiding feathers in their hair. I’m a victim of fashion, and it ain’t fair!”

McLanahan said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I’ve got a proposition for you, so open the door.”

Dave Farkus raked his fingers through his hair that was still pressed to the side of his head from the pillow, and reached for the handle.

Kyle McLanahan was fatter than when Farkus had last seen him, and he’d grown a full rust-colored beard. It was easy to gauge how much the ex-sheriff had gone to hell in less than a year, because there was still a billboard just within the town limits of Saddlestring showing the sheriff with a carrot between his teeth feeding a horse and the words REELECT OUR SHERIFF KYLE MCLANAHAN. Farkus wondered if the man cursed every time he drove by it.

McLanahan squeezed into the vinyl bench seat on one side of the cluttered table but kept his hat on. It was a good hat with a Gus McCrae crease to it, which gave McLanahan a rakish frontier look. The beard helped, too.

“Why don’t you make some coffee?” McLanahan said. “I like mine strong enough to pick up a cow.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” McLanahan said with a drawl.

Farkus had heard that McLanahan was actually from West Virginia but while sheriff had become a frontier character actor. Farkus also knew him to be wily, ruthless, and ambitious. It was no secret that after McLanahan lost the election he went on a two-month bender that ended with him in the Meeteetse town jail, howling at the bitter injustice of it all. Rumors like that traveled fast in Wyoming.

While Farkus filled the carafe of the Mr. Coffee and shoveled twice as many grounds into the filter than he usually would, McLanahan said, “Did you hear about Butch Roberson?”

The name made Farkus jerk and splash water on his hand from the tap. He turned.

“No, what about him?”

“Looks like he murdered two federal agents in cold blood two nights ago and took to the hills. You really hadn’t heard?”

Farkus shook his head. He hadn’t ventured from the single-wide for three days because there was no point going the two miles into town. His disability check hadn’t come yet, and he was cash poor. He couldn’t afford gasoline, beer, or anything else. So he’d just stayed put, tied flies, eaten out of cans the owner had left in the cupboards, and waited for the mail carrier to deliver his check and bail him out. Since he’d left his job, this had become a monthly ritual.

“Did they catch him?” Farkus asked.

“Not as of this morning. Feds are pouring in from Cheyenne, Denver, and Washington, D.C. But they aren’t organized yet. Word is they’ll get their marching orders later today and begin a full-scale search for Roberson in the National Forest where he was last seen.”

Farkus shook his head. “That don’t make any sense to me,” he said. “Butch Roberson is a fugitive?”

“You used to work for him, didn’t you?” McLanahan asked. He had not lost any of his cop stink-eye and tone, Farkus thought.

“For a while.”

“Until he fired you, I heard.”

“I’m filing for unemployment,” Farkus said. “He asked me to do things I couldn’t do, on account of my neck injury.”

McLanahan grinned devilishly. It was hard to see his mouth because of all the whiskers, but basically his beard and mustache shifted a little.

McLanahan said, “Yeah, nothing worse than a bad neck that can’t be found or detected by a doctor. It must get frustrating, always having to go on and on about how much your neck hurts when they can’t find anything wrong with it.”

Farkus gestured at McLanahan with the half-full carafe so a little of the water splashed out of the top: “You said you had a proposition for me, but you’re just busting my balls.”

“Sorry,” McLanahan said. “Didn’t realize you were so sensitive.”

“My neck hurts,” Farkus insisted.

“And I’ve got a huge pain in my ass,” McLanahan drawled. “His name is Mike Reed, and he’s the gimp wearing my badge and sitting in my office. I call him Wheelchair Dick, on account he’s in a wheelchair and he’s a dick who beat me by nine sympathy votes.”

Farkus nodded, wondering where this was going.

McLanahan shifted his weight so the edge of the table wouldn’t prod him in the belly.

He said, “I heard you went hunting with Butch Roberson. Is that true?”

Farkus nodded. His new employer had heard of Farkus’s exploits down in the Sierra Madre, when he’d been hired to guide a team of contract killers into the mountains to hunt for two homicidal brothers. Even though he’d spent most of the time lost, Farkus had embellished the story until he came out looking pretty good. Farkus even suggested to some guys at the Stockman’s Bar that he’d been known as “Pathfinder,” hoping the name would catch on. It didn’t. Despite that, Butch Roberson had wanted to show Farkus his mountains, and Farkus had agreed to go along mainly because his boss had asked him.

“It was goddamned miserable,” Farkus said. “Five straight days of climbing mountains and crawling through down timber. Hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. Butch Roberson is a crazy man. He hunts from an hour before sunrise to an hour past sundown, and he knows every nook and cranny in those mountains. Worst of all, he passed up a half-dozen shots on elk because he wanted to keep hunting. He was like a man possessed by some kind of. . obsession.”

McLanahan grinned. “Did you learn anything?”

“About what?” Farkus said, turning to pour the water into the Mr. Coffee. “What I learned is that blistered feet and sore muscles ain’t my idea of a wonderful time.”

“I mean, did you learn about the terrain in the mountains up above the Big Stream Ranch? Did he show you the elk-hunting areas he likes best?”

“Yeah, and it’s no picnic. It’s rough country up there.”

“Do you think you could go back up there and know your way around?”

Finally, Farkus knew where it was headed.

“There’s a reward,” McLanahan said. “Federal money, and a lot of it-hundreds of thousands, if I heard right. Probably federal stimulus funds,” he said, and laughed. “But a hell of a lot of it.”

“How much?” Farkus asked.

“It don’t matter,” McLanahan said. “What matters is me finding Butch Roberson and either bringing him in or dragging him back facedown.”

Farkus shook his head. “But Butch is a pretty nice guy overall. He’s just an elk-hunting fool.”

McLanahan waved his hand as if swatting at a moth.

“It’s not about Butch Roberson,” McLanahan said, “and it’s not even about the reward that I’ll split down the middle with you.”

He paused for effect, then said, “It’s about nine voters when the next election comes around.”

“Oh,” Farkus said.

“You in?”

Farkus looked around the single-wide at the faded curtains and the buckled interior siding. At the quarter-inch of grease on the underside of the stove hood and the pile of cat feces in the corner of the floor near McLanahan’s boots.

“I can’t swear I can find him,” Farkus said.

“You don’t have to swear. You just have to point me in the right direction before the Feds get their poop in a group.”

McLanahan struggled to pry himself out of the tight fit and took a mug of coffee Farkus poured. He said, “I’ll be back in three hours with horses, guns, and gear. Can you get your shit together by then?”

“I guess so.”

“Pack for a couple of days and nights, although I’m guessing we won’t be up there that long. Word is Butch is on foot. He won’t be able to cover that much ground.”

Farkus asked, “Should I bring my thirty-aught-six?”

“Can you hit anything with it?”

Farkus shrugged. He hadn’t sighted it in since he’d gone hunting with Butch, and he recalled how many times that week he’d bumped the scope on rocks and trees.

McLanahan read his expression and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll have enough hardware to cover us.”

Farkus shook his head and said, “Butch Roberson-that just don’t seem right. He always seemed like, you know, a family guy, even though he could be a hell of a hard-ass on the construction site. I just can’t see him doing what you said he done. What was the deal, anyhow?”

“I didn’t accuse him,” McLanahan said. “Wheelchair Dick and the Feds did. I’m just along for the ride.”

“Will it just be us? Just you and me?”

McLanahan warned, “Don’t get all wrapped up in the details, Dave. Leave the organizing part to me. Your job is to guide, not think, okay?”

Farkus nodded, and was still nodding when McLanahan went out the door. His weight on the front step made the trailer rock.

He was right. Trouble had shown up early.