Out of Range

THIRTY-FOUR

There were Secret Service agents in addition to armed security guards checking invitations at the front gate of the Ennis home. Joe waited behind a black Lexus SUV until it was cleared to proceed, wishing he'd washed the pickup before coming.

A security guard shone a flashlight into Joe's face and asked him to remove his driver's license from his wallet.

"I know you," the guard said, seeing his name. "You're the guy who shot Smoke Van Horn."

Joe nodded and looked away. A Secret Service agent stepped from behind the guard and walked around the front of the truck to the passenger side and opened the door. The agent was lean and young, with an earpiece and cord that snaked down into his jacket. "Are there weapons in this truck?" he asked, looking around inside.

"Standard issue," Joe said, pointing out the carbine under the seat, the shotgun in the gunrack, the cracker shell pistol in the glove box. He was glad he'd left his holster and weapon in the statehouse.

"This is a problem," the agent said, stepping back and speaking into a microphone in his sleeve.

Joe waited, and several cars pulled up behind him.

Finally, the agent climbed into the cab with Joe and shut the door. "Sorry for the inconvenience, but the vice president will be here soon. We'll need to park you away from the premises," he said. "I'll walk you to the front door, and I'll need your keys while you're inside. When you're ready to go tonight, just tell one of my colleagues and I'll meet you at the front door and walk you back to your truck."

The Ennis home was spacious, with high ceilings, marble floors, and walls of windows that framed views of the Tetons. The furniture was made of stripped and varnished lodgepole pine, the style favored locally, and a massive elk antler chandelier with hundreds of small lights hung from a faux-logging chain. The home was crowded with guests bunched around portable bars, waiting for bartenders in tuxedos to pour their drinks. Joe scanned the crowd in the front room for anyone he might know, and saw no one familiar. Everyone, he noticed, looked exceedingly healthy and fit. The men wore open collars and jackets with expensive jeans or khakis, and the women wore cocktail dresses or ultra-hip outdoor casual clothes. He felt out of place, as he normally did. The feeling was made worse when guests gestured toward him and nodded to one another and he realized he was, in fact, being talked about.

A tall man with silver hair and a dark tan-Pete Illoway, the Good Meat guru-broke out of one of the knots of people and strode across the floor with his hand held out to Joe in a showy way. Cautiously, Joe took his hand, wondering what he wanted, while Illoway leaned into him.

"Good work up in those mountains, Mr. Pickett," Illoway said, pumping Joe's hand. "Smoke Van Horn will not be missed. He was an anachronism, and the valley had passed him by."

Joe said nothing, not accepting the praise nor refuting it, thinking about when Smoke had called himself an "arachnidism."

"May I buy you a drink, sir?" Illoway asked.

"That's okay, I can get it myself," Joe said.

Illoway smiled paternalistically, then signaled a bartender and pointed to Joe.

"Bourbon and water, please," he said.

Don Ennis strode purposefully into the room, parting the crowd, saw Joe, and stopped as if he'd hit an invisible wall. Ennis looked at Joe coolly for a moment, then broke into a stage grin and walked over just as Joe's drink arrived.

"Glad you could make it, Mr. Pickett," Ennis said. "I know Stella will be pleased."

Joe wondered what he meant by that.

"Everyone's talking about the incident up in the Thorofare," Ennis said. "You've become quite the celebrity."

"Was it really a gunfight like in the movies?" Illoway asked eagerly.

Joe shook his head. "Not really. It was pretty bad," he said, the image coming back of Smoke's vacant eyes, the way he chanted, It really hurts, it really hurts, it really hurts.

"Well done," Ennis said smartly.

"I said it was bad," Joe snapped back. "It isn't something I'm proud of or something you two should be so damned pleased about."

"But it couldn't have happened to a better guy," Illoway said, raising his glass as if he hadn't heard a word Joe said. "He was an absolute asshole, if you'll pardon my French. Totally against Beargrass Village, and very vocal about it in public meetings. He was Old World, not New World, if you know what I mean."

"Speaking of," Ennis interrupted. "Have you come to a decision on your recommendation? I know we've still got a few days, but…"

Joe had been waiting for this. What he wasn't expecting was to find out Illoway and Ennis thought Joe had done them a huge favor by shooting Smoke.

"I still haven't filed my recommendation," Joe said evenly, "but I'm going to recommend that the concept not go forward unless you install some gates or bridges so the wildlife can migrate. We can't have a situation where the game is forced to cross the highway to get to lower ground. That would be dangerous to drivers and to the herds."

Something dark and cold passed over Ennis's face, as if Joe had double-crossed him. It was the same expression Joe had briefly seen when Stella entered the meeting room the week before.

"You're fucking kidding me," Ennis said in a tight whisper. "You're kidding me, right?"

"Nope," Joe said. "It's the same recommendation Will Jensen was going to make, as you know. I found his last notebook where he came to that conclusion."

Illoway reached for Ennis's arm, but Ennis pulled away, his eyes narrowing into slits.

"Don …" Illoway cautioned Ennis. "Now is not the time." Turning to Joe, Illoway said, "You know, if native species are allowed into the village they could infect our pure meat stock through interaction. I'm sure you're aware of that."

Joe shrugged. "Sure, it's possible. But I don't think you can have a perfectly controlled environment in the middle of wild country. A wise man once told me that real nature is complicated and messy." He enjoyed saying that, but tried not to smile.

"Who was that?" Illoway asked; he looked offended by the thought.

"Smoke Van Horn," Joe said, "the night before I shot him."

"I thought you were smarter than Jensen," Ennis spat. "He was nothing but a philandering drug addict. He was an insect compared to the size and scope of this project."

Joe looked at Ennis and took a sip of his drink. "How do you know he took drugs?"

Ennis looked like he was about to explode. Joe wanted to see it happen, see what the man said and did when he was enraged. Only the entrance of the vice president and his wife averted the concussion. Ennis turned away to greet the man, but before he did he looked over his shoulder and said, "We're not through here."

"No, we're not," Joe said evenly. "You and I have a lot to discuss."

Illoway looked at Joe and shook his head sadly. "What are you trying to do here? And what did you mean when you said we knew what Will Jensen's decision was going to be?"

"Oh," Joe said, his voice calmer and more measured than he felt. "I think you know the answer to that."

He found Stella in the living room, with her back to the bar, sipping from a tall glass. She was well dressed in a crisp white billowy shirt, a short black skirt, and knee-high black boots. For some reason, he assumed her toenails were painted red. She seemed amused by the sight of him, amused by the evening in general. He noticed that she giggled out loud when one of the trophy wives, who was straining for a look at the vice president in the other room, accidentally dropped a cracker covered with some kind of soft white cheese on the leg of her cream-colored pantsuit.

"I'm glad you came," she said when he joined her.

"Your husband isn't," Joe said.

"What was going on in there? It looked like you were trying to bait him."

"I was," Joe said.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

Joe smiled. "I never do. I just bump around sometimes until I hit something."

She finished her drink and handed the glass to the bartender. "Another gin and tonic, please. And what would you like?"

"I have a drink."

"Then have another." She turned around. "Ed, will you please get my friend a bourbon and water?"

Ed looked up. He was taller than Joe, his broad face impassive, his eyes challenging. Joe had obviously broken up a story Ed was telling Stella before the pantsuit incident, and he resented it.

"Ed once skied down the face of the Grand," she told Joe, her eyes widening. "Only twelve people have ever done it."

"Eleven," Ed corrected.

"Ed makes a dozen," she said, and Joe realized she was poking fun at the bartender, but Ed didn't get it. Instead, he puffed out his chest while he poured, straining the buttons on his shirt.

"That's pretty impressive," Joe said, but his mind was still on Don and Pete Illoway, how close he'd come to getting Ennis to blurt something.

She added, "He's got pictures he'll show you. He showed them to me within five minutes of meeting him."

Now you're pushing it, Joe thought. But Ed was easily flattered. He made the drink and handed it to her. "Here you go, Mrs. Ennis."

"And don't forget the bourbon and water for Joe here," she said.

"Yeah," Ed grunted.

Joe and Stella exchanged glances. She was repressing a smile. Gesturing toward the sliding glass doors, she asked, "Have you ever seen the sun set on the Tetons?"

"Oh," Joe mused, "about a dozen times so far."

"Hmpf."

"But I need some air. Thanks for the drink, Ed," Joe said, leading Stella toward the sliding glass doors.

"Make sure he didn't spit in it," she laughed. "Ed's sweet on me."

"Aren't we all?"

"It's my gift to boys," she said, smiling, flirting, but shooting a look at Joe that had just a little bit of fear in it.

The deck was clear of guests because they were all in the great room meeting the vice president. Joe and Stella walked to the corner of the deck, out of the light. Joe followed the trail of her scent through the thin outdoor sweet smell of sage and pine.

"It's a little cold," she said, putting her drink on the railing and hugging herself with her arms. "Don't you want to meet the vice president?"

"Maybe later," Joe said.

"We're going whitewater rafting tomorrow," Stella said. "It will probably be the last time we're able to do it this year before the snow starts flying. The original plan was to take the VP as our guest so Don could sell him on the idea of buying a place in Beargrass, but the Secret Service saw the stretch of river this afternoon and all of the places somebody could shoot at him-not to mention the class four rapids-and put a kibosh on the whole idea. Would you like to come with us instead?"

"That's a nice offer," Joe said, "but I'll pass."

"You should come along anyway. It's the last trip of the year. And maybe the last time for me for a long time," she said ominously.

"What do you mean?"

He could see her eyes glisten in the light of the stars. "Don's about to replace me for a newer model," she said. "I can just tell. The other day he looked at me across the table and said, 'Did you know you have some gray hairs?' He said it in the same tone he uses when he looks at the odometer and says, 'Ninety thousand miles.' That means we'll have a new car within the week.

"He doesn't have her in the wings yet," she said, "but it won't take him long. Don always wants the best, and, well,

I'm getting up there in years. His trophy isn't so shiny anymore. I always knew it would happen. That's why he had the prenup, after all. I knew it would be a short ride. But I was determined that it would be a short, fun ride. With lots of white-water rafting."

Joe looked away, into the darkness of the trees beyond the deck. He could see very little, but he felt something inside him, a kind of warm surge. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"Who else can I tell?" she asked. "Ed? Pete Illoway? One of the trophy wives in there? My mother would just say, 'I warned you about him.'"

"But you never left him," Joe said. "Instead, you had a fling with Will Jensen. I think maybe you like all of this"- he gestured to the house-"a little more than you want to admit."

"That's cruel, Joe," she said in a flat voice.

"Yeah," he said, "it is. But I'm not in a very charitable mood right now. I'm missing my wife and my family more than I can tell you. I can't wait to get back to them. Marybeth is my best friend. When I'm with you, I feel like I'm cheating on her. And I hate feeling that way. I'm no substitute for Will, Stella. That's just one of the things I've figured out tonight."

Joe stood in silence, not wanting to look at her. He knew she was crying, and it bothered him. But he couldn't embrace her, not yet.

"Stella?"

She roughly wiped away the tears on her cheeks and looked up at him.

"Why did you murder Will Jensen?"

"Oh, God," she said, as if he'd slapped her. Her eyes were wide now. She looked scared.

"I know it was you," he said. "I knew it was someone, by the way the gun was fired. Then tonight, before I came out here, I figured out that Will had been drugged, and how it was done. I didn't know it was you who killed him until I talked to some old guy walking his dog. He said he saw you enter Will's house that night after he talked to Will. The neighbor didn't hear the shot, but when he looked out on the street after midnight, your car was gone."

She hugged herself tighter and rocked a little. The surge he had felt inside earlier got hotter. His arms and chest were tingling, and he was finding it difficult to concentrate. Something was happening to him.

"Don't hate me, Joe," she said finally. "I loved that man. I loved the fact that he was real, that he was ordinary. He was a good man, like you."

Joe's legs were getting weak. He leaned against the railing so he wouldn't sway.

"I didn't know they were drugging him. I didn't know until this morning, when you told me at breakfast that the doctor found traces of drugs in you. Then I did some checking with my doctor. He said that drugs like Valium and Xanax can make someone who is already depressed turn suicidal, especially if the victim doesn't know he's being drugged. The doctor told me someone else had been asking about the effects of these drugs earlier in the year- my husband. Don wanted to know what they would do to a person. Don told the doctor he suspected an employee, but obviously he had another purpose in mind. All I knew was that Will was getting worse, and acting out. He was humiliating himself. People were starting to make fun of him. He lost his family and he was about to lose his job, and it broke my heart. He was such a good man.

"When we were up at the state cabin," she said, "he was normal again for a day. He felt guilty being there with me, but he was normal. I thought I had broken through to him. Then he started to shake and get sick. I now know he was suffering withdrawal from the drugs, but he didn't know that and neither did I."

Joe felt hot fingers reach up through his neck, pictured his brain being gripped like a softball. He tried to focus on Stella's words, but they kept slipping out of his grasp.

"When I found him that night he was in terrible shape," she said, sniffing back tears. "His gun was on the table and he couldn't even move. He had thrown up on himself. I guess he thought if he ate all that meat he would flush something out of his system, but it didn't work. My heart was aching for him. He told me I was the only person he loved, but he couldn't take it anymore. I begged him to let me take him to the hospital, but he wouldn't go. He was pathetic, this fine, decent man. This man so unlike the men I had always known."

Joe grabbed the railing with both hands to steady himself, looking out into the darkness. His eyes burned, Stella's words suddenly loud, pounding against his head.

"Twice, he tried to put the gun in his mouth, but he was too far gone. I was crying hysterically, but I got the gun from him and I told him I loved him and I did it for him," she said, the words coming out in a rush. "If I'd known the reason he was in that condition was because my husband … that Don was shoving Will out of his way and getting back at me at the same time …"

She looked away from Joe and gasped. Groggily, Joe turned to see what she saw. He now knew that he had been drugged, that Ed, or the bartender before Ed, or Pete Illoway, had slipped something into his drinks. There was a roaring in his ears, and he couldn't focus on what Stella was saying or on the figures who now stood at the sliding glass door. He heard Don Ennis say, "Stella!" very sharply and saw the vice president, who was next to Ennis, look from Don to Stella to Joe, his reticence causing the Secret Service agents surrounding him to shoulder their way through the door onto the deck.

Joe launched himself forward, nearly falling, and hit Don Ennis square in the nose with a looping roundhouse right, snapping the developer's head back against the sliding door, which shattered, cascading glass onto the carpet inside and the deck outside. Just as quickly, Joe was tackled and overwhelmed. The last thing he saw was the redwood of the deck, winking with shards of glass, rushing up to meet him.

Two hundred and fifty miles away, under the same stars and slice of moon, an SUV with Virginia plates was aimed at the lip of a remote canyon called Savage Run. The driver, who had coaxed it up there over some of the roughest country he had ever seen, eased the gearshift into drive and stepped out as the vehicle rolled forward, picked up speed, and vanished over the edge. It took four full seconds for the sound of the crash to reach the top.