Breaking Point

Roberson in handcuffs, he plucked his badge off his uniform shirt and placed it in Lisa Greene-Dempsey’s outstretched palm. She closed her fingers around it and shook her head sadly.
    “You don’t have to do this,” she said.
    “Yeah, I do,” Joe said. “This has all put such a bad taste in my mouth, I don’t think I’ll ever shake it.”
    “You’re in bad shape,” she said. “You might feel different when this is all behind us.”
    “Is the governor still around?” Joe asked.
    “He’s somewhere in town,” she said.
    “Did my horse survive?”
    “Your horse?”
    “I let him go.”
    The director shrugged and shook her head. She didn’t know anything about Toby.
    Joe grunted and climbed into the van and slid the door shut behind him.
    “Mike,” Joe said to the sheriff, “can I borrow your phone? I need to call my wife.”
    Sheriff Reed handed his phone over.
    As the van cleared the campground, spewing a roll of dust, Joe looked through the back window. Lisa Greene-Dempsey was saying something to Underwood, shaking her head while she did, and still clutching his badge.
    Behind them, massive columns of yellow smoke rolled into the sky from the mountains.
    “Thank you for what you did back there,” Butch Roberson said.
    Joe nodded.
    “Ask Marybeth to tell Pam and Hannah I’m all right, okay?”
    Joe and Roberson exchanged a long look of understanding.
    “I will,” Joe said.
    —
    A FTER HE’D TOLD M ARYBETH he was safe but injured and he might be in the hospital for a few days, and she expressed relief, she said, “Something really odd happened this morning. Did you get my message?”
    “No, what happened?”
    “Pam asked to use the computer so she could check her email, and I pointed her to it. I’d left it on from last night when I called you. But when she sat down at it, her face turned white as a sheet. The EPA site was still up on the screen with Batista’s photo and bio . . .”
    Joe felt something flutter in his stomach.
    “. . . and Pam pointed to the photo of him and said, ‘What is this asshole doing here? And why are they calling him Juan Julio Batista?’”
    “Let me guess,” Joe said. “She knew him as John Pate.”
    “And that’s where things start to connect.”
    Joe noticed that as he spoke the name, Butch’s head had snapped up sharply.



35
    WITH NATE ROMANOWSKI IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF the pickup, Joe turned from the interstate onto the state highway that led to the burning mountains. Joe wasn’t wearing his uniform anymore, which made him feel incomplete. Seven red shirts were in a pile in the corner of the bedroom, where he’d thrown them as if they were radioactive. Spare badges, name tags, his weapon and gear belt, and a dog-eared laminate of the Miranda warning had been tossed on top of the pile.
    Joe glanced down. His personal Remington shotgun was muzzle-down on the bench seat between them. He’d loaded it with double-ought buckshot.
    —
    N ATE WAS TALL AND ANGULAR, with piercing blue eyes and a hatchet nose, and a short blond ponytail since he’d grown his hair back from a year before. The leather strap of the shoulder holster that held his .500 Wyoming Express handgun stretched across a white T-shirt beneath his open pearl-button cowboy shirt.
    As they climbed, Joe hit his headlights. Smoke was still heavy in the air, and he hadn’t seen the sun or blue sky for a week. It was as if someone had placed a lid over the valley to keep it from boiling over.
    There were no living trees on either side of the road, just skeletons with crooked black limbs. The ground was scorched and there were places where it still smoked. The air was bitter and sharp, and Joe’s lungs ached from breathing it in.
    “This reminds me of black-and-white footage from World War One,” Nate said. “It looks like a moonscape.”
    Joe grunted.
    “How big is the fire now?”
    “Last I heard, it stretches a hundred miles to the north and sixty miles to the south. It moves about twenty to twenty-five miles a day depending on the wind.”
    “Big,” Nate said.
    “And getting bigger.”
    The local news was dominated by fire reports and stories of cabins and ranches being burned down, communities evacuated, smoke jumpers killed or injured. People wore masks when they went outside, and public health authorities cautioned young parents to keep their children indoors. Most of the residents of the Saddlestring retirement home had been flown to other locations where they could