Stone Cold (22 page)

She looked up sharply. “Really?”

Joe nodded, hoping he hadn't taken the conversation in a direction he couldn't back out of.

She said, “It's a
huge
place. The owner moved here five or six years ago and just started buying up everything. Other ranches, old buildings, you name it. Most of the people around here either work for Mr. Templeton or owe him.”

“That's what I hear,” Joe said, hoping she would go on.

She said, “I was scared to death for a while, because there was a rumor he was going to put in a farm-and-ranch store that sold implements. Obviously, that would compete with me and drive me out of business. This isn't exactly a booming economy around here.”

“But he hasn't,” Joe said.

“Not yet, anyway,” she sighed. “I wouldn't put it past him, though. He doesn't look real kindly on independent people around here, and believe me, I'm an independent woman. I'm a single mom who raised two boys on my own and never took a dime of welfare.”

“So he doesn't like you?” Joe asked.

She barked a laugh. “I'd guess he doesn't even know I'm alive. But a couple of his flunkies do, and they might suggest to him that a nice new dealership would go real well in Sundance.”

Joe thought:
Critchfield and Smith.

He asked, “What's he like?”

“Mr. Templeton?”

“Yes.”

“He does a lot for the community,” she said without enthusiasm. “Very little happens around here that he doesn't sponsor or fund in some way. So why do you ask? Do you know him? Are you on his payroll?”

The question surprised Joe. “No and no.”

“Just checking. If you're not, you're one of the few. You and me have that in common, I guess.”

“So he's got his fingers into everything?” Joe said.

“Everything.”

“What's wrong with that?” he asked. “It's got to be a good thing to have a local philanthropist.”

She stared back, puzzled.

“A guy who pays for and sponsors things,” he explained.

“Yeah,” she said. “But honestly, sometimes I wonder. I guess I'm just a suspicious person, but I wonder if he does all these nice things for the county because he has a good heart and plenty of money or if he does them so he can be in control. I think I'm about the only one asking that question anymore. There used to be others that agreed with me, but he's picked them off one by one and now they're all on his side. That's what money can do, I guess.”

The credit card machine came to life with an approval, and a length of paper rolled out of it like a tongue. She ripped it free and handed it over to Joe for his signature.

As he signed, he asked, “What does he do to make all this money when he flies off in his plane?”

Instead of answering, she laughed unconvincingly and shrugged. She was done talking.

•   •   •

A
FEW
MOMENTS LATER,
Joe drove the ATV down a weedy alley to where he'd hidden his pickup. Using a pair of collapsible ramps he'd purchased from the hardware store earlier, he drove the four-wheeler up into the bed, lashed it down tight with straps to a couple of eyebolts on the interior walls, and shut the gate.

He wondered if he'd found his CI.

•   •   •

O
N THE
WAY OUT OF TOWN,
he stopped at a convenience store to top off the gas tank on his truck and to fill the ATV. He wanted to make sure there was enough fuel in his new purchase to get him to the headquarters of the Sand Creek Ranch and back.

University of Wyoming, Laramie

Between classes, Sheridan Pickett rode the elevator alone to the fourth floor of White Hall. She stood in the corner of the car, clutching her textbooks—
Introduction
to Criminal Justice
and
Chemistry 1020
—to her chest. She liked her criminal justice class as much as she hated chem. Criminal justice, she thought, was in her wiring.

Before the doors opened on four, she took a deep breath and put on her game face, which was a smile. Being the resident assistant meant she could no longer be anonymous, the way she had been her first two years of college. Now she knew all the students on her floor—and a few of the busybody RAs—kept an eye on her. Her residents followed her lead in regard to behavior, and she made sure she was never observed bending the rules.

She heard male voices down the hall as the doors hummed open, but no one was standing in front of her to get on. She glanced over
her shoulder in the direction of the voices as she made her way to her room and saw a pair of roommates at the end of the hall, gesticulating wildly. Sheridan paused.

Their names were Matt Nicol and David Hansard, both freshmen from Cody. They'd each started the year paired with a roommate they didn't get along with and found each other. They occupied the corner room at the end of the hall, one of the larger dorm rooms, and they seemed to Sheridan to be normal, red-blooded Wyoming boys who wore hoodies, caps cocked sidewise, and baggy jeans. They liked to hunt, fish, and drink too much. And they were having a loud argument of some kind. She'd never heard them raise their voices before.

It wasn't Sheridan's role to intervene, but at the same time she didn't want the argument to escalate. She thought that by standing in the hallway looking in their direction she would send the signal they were being observed. Often, that alone cooled things down.

Nicol saw her, mid-rant, and went suddenly quiet.

She waved at him.

Hansard, who had stomped away from Nicol into the room and couldn't be seen, suddenly appeared around the doorjamb to see what had made Nicol stop speaking.

She waved at him, too. “You guys okay?”

Nicol looked to Hansard instead of answering, but Hansard grinned and said, “Oh, yeah. Everything's fine,” and reached out and shut their door.

Sheridan gave it another half-minute. If they were still having a conflict, they were doing it quietly. That was good enough, she thought.

Then she heard a shuffle of feet directly in front of her. The sound
would have been masked by the yelling if the yelling was still going on, and when she looked up she realized she was standing less than two feet from Erik Young's door. There was a thin stripe of light beneath the door, punctuated by the shadows of two feet.

He was right there, she thought, standing on the other side of the door. Listening to her, listening to what was going on in the hallway. There were no other sounds from behind the door—no video games, no television, no music. If it wasn't for the door itself, she realized, she'd be eighteen inches from him.

Quietly, she said, “Erik?”

No response.

A little louder: “Erik?”

The shadows vanished from beneath the door. He'd backed quietly away.

She shuddered and turned for her room, and it felt good to her to close and lock her door.

•   •   •

S
HE DUMPED
HER BOOKS
on her desk and scrolled to a Pandora classic country channel she'd created on her computer. For reasons she couldn't really explain—maybe it had to do with where she came from—the twang of George Strait, Chris LeDoux, and Patsy Cline always made her feel comfortable when she was trying to sort out her feelings. As if Pandora could read her mind, Chris LeDoux's “Look at You Girl” came on. She never listened to that channel with anyone else around, though. Too uncool.

On her wall was a collage of framed photos, most of them selfies with her and her girlfriends mugging for a camera phone. Then there were family photos—a formal one with everyone wearing stiff
clothing where she looked particularly photogenic—and an informal one taken two summers before by a friend near their corrals. Her dad, mom, Lucy, and she glanced toward the camera from where they perched on the corral rails behind their house on Bighorn Road. Her mom was in jeans—her riding outfit—and had just ridden Rojo. April stood off to the side, looking annoyed. And in the background, looking out from behind the barn like some kind of burglar, was Nate Romanowski. She loved this photo for its candid nature. No one was posing, and Nate had been caught by surprise. It was the only photo she had of Nate, her mentor in falconry. She was sure he would rather it had never been taken.

When there was a knock on her door, she quickly doused the music on her computer and leaned into the peephole. If it was Erik Young, she wasn't sure what she would do.

But it was Matt Nicol and David Hansard, both with their hands jammed into their pockets, both looking at their feet.

“Hi, guys,” she said, opening her door.

They grumbled a hello.

“What can I do for you? I've got a few minutes before I head to lunch.”

Nicol looked to Hansard to take the lead, and Hansard did. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”

“Of course.”

“Can we come in and close the door?”

She hesitated for a few seconds, then backed up and stepped aside. Neither had been in her room before—they weren't the type to share concerns with her. Both entered cautiously, looking around at the photos and decorations. She was glad she didn't have any underwear lying around.

“We can trust you, right?” Hansard said. “Everybody says you're cool.”

She shrugged and said, “It sort of depends. If it's something really bad—”

“It is,” Nicol said gravely.

“Maybe,” Hansard countered, shooting a
shut-up
look to his roommate.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You said during orientation that your door was always open. I remember that. If we can't trust you, we might get kicked out of school.”

It was a dilemma. She wanted to know, but she didn't want to know something that would put her—and them—at risk.

“All I can tell you is I'll be fair,” she said. “If you guys tell me you committed a felony or something, well, I can't just not report it. But if it's something else—”

“See?” Nicol said to Hansard. “I told you we shouldn't have come here.”

Hansard said, “She isn't a dorm Nazi, like some of the others.”

“What is it?” she asked.

Hansard and Nicol exchanged looks again, and Hansard said, “Our guns are missing.”

She gasped and covered her mouth with her fingertips. She didn't want to, but she did. “What do you mean? From where?”

“We had them under our beds,” Hansard said. “We know you're not supposed to have them in the dorm. We're not idiots—we know how to handle guns, and they weren't loaded or anything.”

“Mine was,” Nicol corrected.

“Except for his, I guess,” Hansard said, looking anywhere but at her face.

“Okay,” she said, leaning back on her desk. “You know you aren't supposed to have them in university housing. You signed a resident agreement saying you wouldn't bring any firearms into the dorm, and we talked about it at orientation.”

Nicol and Hansard grumbled in agreement. Guns
were
allowed at the university, but only if they were stored at the UW Police Department. Every student was allowed up to three weapons plus a bow on campus as long as they were checked in and left in storage. A photo ID was required to store them or check them out.

“We screwed up,” Hansard said. “We went out target shooting a few weeks ago and got back late at night. We
meant
to take them to the station, but we never got around to it.”

“How many guns are we talking about?” she asked.

“Four,” Hansard said. “My 12-gauge shotgun and Ruger .357 Magnum revolver. Matt has a .223 Bushmaster and a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol.”

“The pistol was the one that is loaded?” she asked.

Nicol nodded sheepishly.

“How long have they been missing?”

“Who knows?” Hansard said. “Anytime in the last three weeks. Neither one of us even checked until just a few minutes ago—that's what we were arguing about. I wouldn't have even realized they were gone except I dropped a can of Copenhagen and it rolled under the bed. When I went down to get it, all I could see was dust bunnies.”

“I really need that pistol back,” Nicol said. “It belongs to my grandma.”

Hansard said, “The shotgun belongs to my dad. He'd kill me if he found out I lost it.”

“Does anyone have a key to your door besides you?” she asked.

They both shook their heads. Nicol said, “We thought about that. The thing is, as you know, our room is kind of a party room. We leave the door open all the time on Friday night and on the weekends. Sometimes we go to someone else's room and just leave it open. Everybody knows we always have beer in our fridge, and people just go in and grab one. Anybody could have gone in there and taken them.”

Sheridan closed her eyes and tried to think of what to do besides the obvious: call the campus police. But that might trigger an overreaction. There had already been one all-campus lockdown earlier in the semester when someone reported an untended backpack in the commons. It turned out the backpack was full of textbooks and granola bars.

“What I hope,” Hansard said, “is that we've been punked. Maybe one of our friends took them just to watch us flip out.”

“Is that possible?” she asked.

“You don't know our friends,” he said, rolling his eyes. “One of them shit in Matt's bed once and he didn't realize it for two days.”

“Shut
up
,” Nicol said, red-faced.

“We don't want to get kicked out,” Hansard said.

“Okay,” Sheridan said. “Here's what I'm willing to do, but no more. Right now, I'm as guilty as you are since you told me. I'll give you forty-eight hours to try and find out who took them. Talk to
all
of your friends. Email them, text them, whatever you have to do. If one of them punked you and fesses up, you can get the guns back and check them where you're supposed to, and we can forget about
this as long as you don't do it again. But if those guns can't be found . . .”

“We're in the shit,” Hansard said.

“We're all in the shit,” she said. “It isn't like somebody stole your iPod.”

•   •   •

A
FTER THEY'D
LEFT,
she realized she'd lost her appetite for lunch. She was angry at herself as well. The easy thing would have been to call the police and let the chips fall where they may. But she hated to be responsible for the expulsion of two students. They weren't bad, just stupid. Like just about every other freshman.

She stared at her phone and contemplated calling her dad for advice. Maybe even her mom, except she'd probably freak out.

Nicol and Hansard were like most of the boys she'd grown up with around Saddlestring. Guns were a fact of life.

And she thought of those two feet under Erik Young's door.

Sheridan reached over and pressed
PLAY
on the Pandora window. Chris LeDoux again, with “Hooked on an 8 Second Ride.”