Stone Cold

10

The town of Medicine Wheel was seventeen miles north on a potholed county road, and it looked to Joe as if a strong wind might blow it away. There was a dilapidated gas station and convenience store — closed — on the entrance into town, and the only other business that seemed to be in operation was the Whispering Pines Motel, which was tucked away in a copse of trees on the top of a wooded rise a half-mile away from the town itself. It was easy to find because there were three brightly lit small signs on the sides of the road saying WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: YOUR ROADSIDE OASIS, WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: HOME AWAY FROM HOME, and WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: LIKE STAYING AT GRANDMA’S.

Joe was curious to meet Grandma.

The facility had a single-level home that served as the office, flanked by eight small cabins, four on each side. No, Joe thought, seven cabins. On the far east side was a small tangle of burnt framework. That’s where the DCI agent had been.

The tiny office lobby had a counter with a key and a note that read: FOR MR. PICKETT — Sleep tight and hit the bell if it isn’t too late. Otherwise, check in tomorrow. Sweet Dreams, Anna B. All of the i’s were dotted with little hearts. The walls of the dimly lit lobby were smothered with country-themed kitsch — hand-painted farmers and their wives, doe-eyed cows with long lashes, lots of wooden signs with cute and precious sayings like MY HEART BELONGS TO MY GRANDKIDS, IF YOU CLIMB IN THE SADDLE BE READY FOR THE RIDE, MY GREATEST BLESSINGS CALL ME NANA, I’M A QUILTER AND MY HOUSE IS IN PIECES…

Joe sighed, uncomfortable with the cuteness, and pressed a buzzer on the counter while he grabbed the key. He heard a chime ring in a back room, and waited for a moment.

“Mr. Pickett?”

“That’s me.”

Anna B. emerged from the shadowed hallway with a wide grin and eyes that sparkled behind steel-framed glasses. She was doughy and round, and looked like a caricature of a country grandmother — tight silver curls, apple cheeks, an overlarge sweatshirt with hearts appliquéd on the front.

She dug out an old-fashioned registration form from a stack under the counter and handed it to Joe along with a pen with a taped plastic rose on it, apparently so Joe wouldn’t have the urge to take it with him.

“Please fill out all the lines,” she said. “I’ve got you in cabin number eight. It’s our coziest and roomiest, since your reservation said you’d be here for a week.”

“Thank you,” Joe said, filling in his name, address, and license plate number.

“Is it your first time here?”

“Yup,” Joe said.

“So what brings you to Medicine Wheel?”

“Business,” he said. “I’m with the Game and Fish Department. Helping out Jim Latta for a few days.”

“Oh,” she said, pressing her fingertips to her lips, “that poor, poor man. He’s such a nice man. It’s so sad about his family.”

“Yup, it is.”

“That little girl of his — she’s such a pistol. She doesn’t let a little handicap hold her back.”

He completed the registration form and handed it to her with his credit card. She rammed it through a manual slider with surprising determination, he thought.

While she did, he noticed a decades-old certificate on the wall behind her recognizing Anna Bartholomew as Medicine Wheel County Businesswoman of the Year in 1991.

“Are you Anna?” he asked.

“Why, yes.”

“Are you related to the judge?”

“He’s my brother,” she said, with the smile still firmly in place. But her eyes were probing. “Do you know him?”

“Not yet,” Joe said.

“If you’re around here, you’ll probably run into him,” she said. “There aren’t many of us left.”

He looked at his key. “What happened to cabin number one out there?”

“Oh,” she said, as if overcome by the question, “it burned to the ground in the middle of the night. It was horrible, just horrible. It’s so sad, because Mr. Thompson was in it at the time.”

“What caused the fire?” Joe asked.

She shook her head and waved away the dire implications of the question. “They still don’t know for sure, but the investigators said he was smoking in bed. We have a strict rule about not smoking inside our units. You’re not a smoker, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, good. It was so tragic what happened. Mr. Thompson was not a nice man, but he didn’t deserve what happened to him…” She caught herself and shook her head. “I shouldn’t say such a thing about him. I didn’t know his heart, so I shouldn’t say something not nice about him.”

Joe nodded.

“Just in case, we’ve had all our wiring updated and inspected since then,” she said, assuring him, “and everything is shipshape. The sheriff’s department did a thorough investigation and determined we weren’t to blame in any way. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

She paused as she separated his receipt from her original credit card form. “I see your ring. Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“Three girls.”

“All girls,” she said, practically singing. “That must be wonderful for you. Children are such a blessing. And wait until you have grandchildren! They are the most wonderful treasures. Do you have any yet?”

“Not close.”

“Yes, you do look too young. I have four,” she said. “Four little angels that love their nana.”

Joe smiled and chinned toward her many grandma items on the walls while she reeled off their names and ages. The oldest was twelve. She began to tell him about young Josh, and he listened for five minutes.

Finally, she reached across the counter and gave him a friendly swipe on his arm. “Oh, you don’t care about hearing all about them. You’re probably tired and want to get to your room.”

“Well…”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m just happy you’re here. You’re our only guest tonight.”

“I see that.”

“This place used to be quite busy,” she said with a defensive edge to her voice. “We used to be filled with coal miners and loggers for most of the year. That’s why every cabin has a kitchenette. But these days, with the economy and gas prices…”

“It’s tough,” Joe said, working his way toward the door.

“Thank God for Mr. T.,” she said. “He sends a few of his hunters here from time to time — plus people who come here to meet with him about something. I know he doesn’t need to do that, because he owns the largest hotel in the county, so I know he does it out of the goodness of his heart. Otherwise, I don’t know what we’d do.”

“Mr. T.? Wolfgang Templeton?”

“Oh, yes, he’s a wonderful man. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man.”

“I’ve heard he’s generous,” Joe said, recalling what Latta had told him.

“He’s our savior, almost. This county would just die without him.”

“That’s quite a compliment,” Joe said.

“And every word is true,” she chirped. “You know, the day after the fire, he showed up here himself with rolls and coffee, and he had some of his men help clean up. Some of his maintenance people worked with the sheriff to make sure the wiring was good in all the rest of the cabins, and he never even sent a bill. I didn’t even know him very well — not like my brother — but he said he’d heard about our tragedy and wanted to reach out. That’s the kind of man he is.”

Cabin number eight had a long list of rules on a laminated piece of construction paper mounted over the desk and written in Anna B.’s hand. Joe tossed his bag into the spare room while the ancient electric heater under the window clicked and hummed and filled the cabin with the smell of burning dust and miller moths. He wondered how long it had been since another guest had used it.

While Joe poured two shots of bourbon from his flask into a cheap plastic cup, he tried to check his email only to discover that the motel — and possibly all of Medicine Wheel — had no Internet access.

He called Marybeth on his cell and they talked for twenty minutes. Marybeth had heard nothing from Sheridan, either, and was frustrated that the computers were down at the library most of the day and she’d not found out anything on Erik Young. April was still sulking in her room, and Lucy was at play practice. Rojo had a mysterious patch of hair missing from his forehead that must have come from scraping it against the corral door.

Joe told her about the pheasants, meeting Jim Latta, and the Whispering Pines Motel.

He said, “It’s really… cute.”

“Would I like it?”

“Probably not,” he said, leaning back and looking around his room. The prints — old C. M. Russells — on the walls were decades old and faded.

Then he asked her to look up a couple of names and another item the next day when she went to the library, provided the network was back up.

“The names Bill Critchfield and Gene Smith,” Joe said. “I checked dispatch and they have no priors, but I’m wondering what else is out there. And see if you can find out what it costs to perform major scoliosis surgery.”

He felt guilty for even asking.

“That’s an interesting list,” she said. Then: “Joe, you’re keeping your distance, right? Like you promised?”

“Of course.”

Although he was exhausted, he couldn’t sleep. The first night in a strange place was always a long one. When the heater kicked on to ward off the chill, it moaned to life and ticked furiously. When it was off, the silence outside was awesome, filled only with a slight breeze through the branches of the pines.

Twice he heard the crunch of gravel from tires on the road outside. When headlights swept through the thin curtains of his cabin, he sat up straight in bed. He’d brought several of his weapons into the room with him before locking his pickup, and he felt for where he’d propped his 12-gauge Remington Wingmaster in the corner near his bed. It was loaded with double-ought buckshot. But whoever had driven into the motel alcove had turned around and left, as if doing a drive-through.

He wondered if it was simply a wrong turn or if someone was checking out where he was staying.

Then he thought about what it must be like to wake up to find the cabin burning up around him, and he got dressed.

It was one in the morning when Joe located the isolated logging road in the hills below Wedell. He made the turn into the dark timber and saw fresh tire tracks in the mud in the ruts ahead of him. Sleet sliced down through his headlights, and he switched them off in favor of his under-the-bumper sneak lights as he drove up the hill he had taken that afternoon with Jim Latta.

When he got to the top of the meadow, his precautions turned out to be largely unnecessary, because below in the trees there was a slaughter going on.

He stayed in the cab of the pickup but lowered the side windows. Down near the tree line was a hastily parked pickup with an empty trailer behind it. Inside the trees were the percussive blasts of shotguns and high whines from ATVs roaring around. Periodically, he saw the flash of headlights through the trunks as a four-wheeler spun around, and the red spouts from the muzzles of the guns. Once he saw the inverted teardrop shape of a rooster pheasant shoot out of the trees, only to explode into feathers and bounce along the grass like a kicked football. It landed near the parked truck.

There were shouts: “Got you, you motherfucker! Ha!”

The only bouts of silence were when they had to reload.

Joe pulled out his cell phone and called Jim Latta’s home number. It went straight to voicemail.

“Jim, Joe. I’m up here where we released those birds this afternoon and there’s a firefight going on. I’m pretty sure I see Bill Critchfield’s truck on the lower part of the meadow and I can hear four-wheelers racing around and plenty of gunshots. I figure these guys want to poach out all those pheasants while they’re still bunched up.”

He paused. Then: “This is your district and I don’t want to bigfoot, but I hate guys who do things like this. I’ll wait here until two. Call me back if you want to hook up and make an arrest. Otherwise, I’ll head back to town.”

A few minutes later, he left the same message on Latta’s cell, then called in his location and situation to dispatch. The reception was scratchy, and he wasn’t sure the night dispatcher understood him, but at least they’d have something to go on if he disappeared off the face of the earth.

The shotgun blasts continued.

Finally, Joe grabbed his shotgun, told Daisy to stay, and got out of his pickup. He wished his request for a night-vision lens for his digital camera had been approved, but he’d been told at the time that an employee with his record of equipment wreckage couldn’t be trusted with $7,000 surveillance hardware.

So he used the camera on his cell phone. He snapped photos of the pickup — it was the F-250 that had been outside the Bronco Bar — as well as the license plate, the boxes of shotgun shells inside the cab, and the muddy tracks of the ATVs from the pickup to the trees. Joe leaned over and got a good photo of the mangled pheasant that had dropped in the meadow after being shot from inside the trees. The coloring on the ring-necked rooster was vibrant in the flash: gold, vermilion, beaded with droplets from the sleet.

Before he left, he placed one of his business cards under the windshield wiper of the pickup so they’d know he’d been there. Then he trudged back up the hill. While he did, he looked over his shoulder to make sure the four-wheelers hadn’t emerged from the timber to chase him down.

Inside the cab, Joe reached over and patted Daisy on the head and said, “Yup, it’s a whole different world here.”