Breaking Point

meet her for breakfast at the Holiday Inn the next morning at 7:30. It wasn’t a request.
    Sheridan had shown him the Facebook pages for nineteen-year-old Bryce Pendergast and twenty-year-old Ryan McDermott, both of Saddlestring, both classmates of hers from high school. Pendergast’s page showed him cradling a used .223 Ruger Mini-14 rifle with a banana clip. McDermott’s had a short video of a full-grown pronghorn getting cut down by a series of shots and someone off camera hooting about it. The photo and the video had been posted the same night a week before. Joe recognized the buck by its curled-in ivory-tipped horns.
    —
    “C AN’T SLEEP EITHER?” Marybeth asked, fully awake.
    “Nope.”
    “I can’t stop thinking about the Robersons,” she said. “How horrible it is what happened with them.”
    Joe grunted. He said, “Something about the story Pam told us doesn’t sound right.”
    “Do you think she was lying? Leaving something out?”
    “I want to hope that,” Joe said. “But it’s so similar to what happened in Idaho. There’s no way it can just be a coincidence.”
    Marybeth asked, “Is it possible it’s some kind of warped policy directive? To go after people in different states in the same way?”
    “Not likely,” Joe said. “The EPA is getting heat and bad publicity for the Sackett case because it was so outrageous. There’s no way they would encourage their people to do it again. No, this is similar, but it’s different. I just can’t figure out how. And I can’t figure out why Pam and Butch are in the middle of it.”
    Marybeth sighed and snuggled in closer to him. “I know what you mean,” she said. “It just always amazes me how you can know someone for years and then find out things about them you never even imagined. I never had a clue about their dispute with the EPA, or that Butch had left Pam for so long.”
    “They kept it in all that time,” Joe said.
    Marybeth placed her bare arm over his chest. She said, “Sometimes I think the most mysterious thing that exists is the interworking of a relationship. You can just never even guess the things that go on behind closed doors.”
    Joe said, “Nope.”
    “Hannah is the one I’m most worried about.”
    Joe said, “Yup.”
    —
    J OE THOUGHT ABOUT the arrival of Batista and Underwood on the scene. Underwood seemed to Joe like a type he’d dealt with before: tough, cold, professional—doing a dirty job well if they had no choice. A little like his friend Nate Romanowski and Nate’s friends. Despite Underwood’s manner and innuendo, Joe thought he could deal with him.
    Batista was another matter. Batista unnerved Joe in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.
    But when he closed his eyes, he saw the haunted face of Butch Roberson, somewhere up there in the beetle-killed forest in the dark, no doubt listening for the first sounds of the men who would be coming to hunt him down.



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