"Why do they keep playing it again and again? Can you make them stop?" April said.
Another sound emerged, layered beneath the snappy tune of "Danke Schoen." The first hints of it were distant: A knife being honed on a sharpening steel. There was a slight pop and the sound of tearing, like fabric being ripped, accompanied by a high-pitched, otherworldly squeal that set Jeannie's teeth on edge. April cried harder, her body shaking. The squealing was now ear-piercing. It began to overwhelm the Wayne Newton song.
"You know what that is?" Clem said, now awake. "That's a rabbit being skinned alive."
Jeannie didn't ask him how he knew that.
Finally, it stopped. The rabbit panted shallowly, then died with a death rattle.
April was now shaking, her hands covering her ears, her eyes closed tight.
Then the brassy music started up again, louder. Then the background sound of the knife being sharpened. Danke schoen, darling Danke schoen, Thank you for walks down Lover's Lane…
PART THREE
Whiteout Twenty-five The telephone next to the bed burred at 5:05 A.M. and Joe picked it up on the first ring. It was County Attorney Robey Hersig.
"Did I wake you up?"
"It's okay," Joe said. "I've been awake most of the night." Marybeth had slept poorly again, tossing and turning and pining for April. Joe had tried to calm her, with partial success. After she went back to sleep, he replayed in his head the conversation he'd had with Nate Romanowski, playing "What if?" What if, he wondered, he told Romanowski he needed his help? What if he turned Romanowski loose?
"Joe, did anybody notify you about a meeting this morning at the Forest Service office?"
"Nope."
"I didn't think so. Anyway, Melinda Strickland and Sheriff Barnum have called a meeting for seven-thirty. All county law-enforcement personnel have been ordered to be there. They've requested that all state personnel be there as well, so I assume that means the state troopers and you."
Joe closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "What's going on?"
"Hell has broken loose." The coffee in his road cup tasted bitter and metallic as he drove toward Saddlestring. It was unusually dark out for seven, and it took him a moment to see that the cloud cover was so dense and far-reaching that it blocked out the rising sun. It was as if a sooty lid had been placed over the valley. The only gap in the lid was a razor-thin band of orange that paralleled the eastern sagebrush plains. That band was the only hard evidence that it was daylight.
Joe knew that a big storm was coming.
He remembered the feeling he'd had in the wooded bowl before hearing Lamar Gardiner's gunshots. It was the feeling of artillery being moved into place prior to a barrage. He felt it again-only this time, it was worse. Joe was shocked at the number of law-enforcement vehicles parked around the Forest Service office off Main Street. He parked half a block away and approached the building on a buckling concrete sidewalk. The air was still but seemed supercharged with rising humidity and low pressure. It was still unusually dark out, and Joe recalled the otherworldly half-light created by a solar eclipse the previous summer. He looked at his watch and saw that he was right on time for the meeting.
The reception and conference area had been completely transformed since his visit on New Year's Eve. The standard-issue government desks had been turned and shoved against the walls to create more space. Deputies, town police officers, and state troopers milled in the open area drinking coffee. Joe had never seen so many big guts straining against uniform shirt fabric in one place at one time. Although there was little talking this early in the morning, he heard the clump of heavy boots and the creak of leather from holsters and Sam Browne belts. Deputies McLanahan and Reed were missing from the room, and Joe guessed they were still on roadblock duty. He scanned the room for Robey Hersig and found him near the back to the side of the coffee urn.
"Thanks for calling," Joe said to Hersig. "I think."
Hersig looked anxious. "Joe, did you get a fax this morning?"
Joe said that the last fax he'd received from anybody was a list of food items that Elle Broxton-Howard didn't want to eat.
"You're one of the few, then." Hersig reached inside his blazer and handed Joe a folded sheaf of documents. The cover page of the fax was addressed to Robey, and the letterhead showed that it was from the Sovereign Citizens of the Rocky Mountains. After the cover was page after page of dense legalese. Statutes were cited throughout, including the Uniform Commercial Code. Joe was puzzled, and glanced up to Hersig.
"What is this?"
Hersig smiled sourly. "Two things, actually. The first is a subpoena to appear before their court to defend against the charge of impersonating a public official. The second is a lien against the county courthouse, the sheriff's office, and my home for $27.3 million dollars." "What?"
Hersig nodded, and swallowed dryly. "Subpoenas and liens were faxed all over the place during the middle of last night." He held his hand out-Joe noticed it was shaking slightly-and started counting off with his fingers. "The mayor, the town council, the county commissioners, the chief of police, the BLM director, Melinda Strickland, the governor of Wyoming…"
"Governor Budd got one?"
Hersig nodded and continued. "The Interior Secretary of the United States, the national Forest Service director, the director of the FBI, and I don't know who all else got them nationally. Those are just the phone calls we've received this morning. That's just the East Coast, which is two hours ahead of us. We don't know how many people in the West will call."
"What prompted this?" Joe had never seen Hersig so shaky.
Hersig's eyes narrowed. Joe thought Hersig was about to spit a name out when the likely bearer of the name walked into the room.
Melinda Strickland wore her Forest Service uniform, and her cocker spaniel trailed behind her on a leash. She strode purposefully to the front of the room and stationed herself behind a podium. Sheriff Barnum flanked her on one side, Dick Munker on the other. Munker sucked on a cigarette with the same intensity as an asthma victim using an inhaler.
"Thank you all so much for coming," Melinda Strickland said, her manner incongruously pleasant. Joe noted that her hair was a mousy brown color once again. "As you know, a situation developed yesterday that compounded during the night. I see Game Warden Joe Pickett in the back there-he somehow learned about this meeting-and we all have our friend Joe to thank for bringing at least one of the murderers to justice!"
Joe wished he could worm himself through the back wall, as officers, deputies, and troopers all turned and looked at him. His fellow state employees-the troopers-clapped sharply, but they were the only ones. Joe knew that the others, especially the deputies, probably felt they'd been shown up. His intuition was confirmed when he noticed how Barnum was glowering at him from the front of the room. Someday, Joe thought, he and I will need to have it out. There are scores to settle.
"The important thing…" Strickland shouted over nonexistent applause, as if trying to bring the silent room to heel, "The important thing is that we've been anticipating this situation for quite some time and we have everything completely and totally and awesomely under control. So now I'd like to turn the briefing over to Dick Munker of the FBI, who is heading up the operation on my behalf."
Munker extinguished his cigarette and turned to the podium, but Strickland thought of something and remained. She raised a thick stack of papers in the air and waved them. Joe recognized them as similar to what Hersig had showed him.
"I don't know how many of you got these during the night, but now you know the kind of twisted people we are dealing with here, ya know!"
Munker lit another cigarette and gave her a moment to leave the podium. When she did, he surveyed the room with amusement in his eyes before stepping forward. He wore a gray sweater over a black turtleneck, and a shoulder holster. A two-way radio was hanging in a case on his belt.