C J Box - The Disappeared

THE JOE PICKETT NOVELS

Vicious Circle

Off the Grid

Endangered

Stone Cold

Breaking Point

Force of Nature

Cold Wind

Nowhere to Run

Below Zero

Blood Trail

Free Fire

In Plain Sight

Out of Range

Trophy Hunt

Winterkill

Savage Run

Open Season

THE STAND-ALONE NOVELS

Paradise Valley

Badlands

The Highway

Back of Beyond

Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

Blue Heaven

SHORT FICTION

Shots Fired: Stories from Joe Pickett Country

G. P. PUTNAMS SONS

Publishers Since 1838

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright 2018 by C. J. Box

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Ebook ISBN 9780698410114

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

For the people of the Upper North Platte River Valley, and to Laurie, always

PART

He aint gettin nowhere and hes losin his share,

He must have gone crazy out there.

Michael Burton, Night Riders Lament

Wylie Frye was used to smelling of smoke and that was long before he became a criminal of sorts.

Wood smoke permeated his clothing, his hair, and his full black beard to the point that he didnt notice it anymore. He was only reminded of his particular odor when drinkers on the next barstool or patrons standing in line at the Kum-N-Go convenience store leaned away from him and turned their heads to breathe untainted air.

But he didnt mind. Hed smelled worse at times in his life, and wood smoke wasnt so bad.

On cold nights like this, after hed used the front-end loader to deliver bucket after bucket of sawdust to the burner from a small mountain of it near the mill, he could relax in the burner shack and let the warmth of the fire and the sweet blanket of smoke engulf him.

Wylie sat at a metal desk under a light fixture mounted in the wall behind him and stared at the dark screen of his cell phone. It was two-forty-five in the morning and his visitor was fifteen minutes late. Wylie was starting to fidget.

He watched the screen because he knew he wouldnt hear the phone chime with an incoming text over the roar from the fire outside. In the rusting shack where Wylie sat, fifty feet from the base of the burner, it sounded like he was inside a jet engine. The west wallwhich was made of corrugated steel and faced the burnerradiated enough heat that he couldnt touch it with his hand. In the deep January winter of the Upper North Platte River Valley, Wylie had the warmest blue-collar job of anyone he knew. So there was that.

If he had to stink in order to stay warm on the job, it was a trade-off he was willing to make. He still had nightmares about that winter hed spent working outside on a fracking rig in North Dakota where hed lost two toes and the tip of his little finger to frostbite.

Every minute or so, Wylie looked up from the phone on the desk to the small opaque portal window that faced the road outside, expecting to see headlights approaching. He couldnt see clearly because the smoke left a film on the glass that distorted the view, even though he wiped it clear nightly with Windex.

There was nothing to see, though.

It wasnt just the heat from the fire that was making him sweat. He tapped the top of the desk with his fingertips in a manic rhythm. He felt more than heard his belly surge with acid and he tasted the green chili burrito hed eaten for dinner at the Bear Trap in Riverside. It was going to be a long night.

The conical steel structure, known alternatively as a beehive, tipi, or wigwam burner for its resemblance to each, roared in the dark and belched a solid column of wood smoke into the frigid night sky of Encampment, Wyoming. The burner was fifty feet high and its fuel was sawdust from the mill.

Its biggest fires took place at night by designwhen sleeping residents couldnt see the volume of smoke and complain about it. The flames often burned so hot that the walls of the wigwam glowed red like the cherry of a massive cigar and errant sparks drifted out of the steel mesh at the top like shooting stars. When the base was filled with sawdust and fully aflame, the temperature inside exceeded a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

There was a window of time to do what they wanted to do, hed told the men who would be texting him. Even though it was rare when anybody was up and around in the middle of the night in Encampment, a tiny mountain hamlet of barely four hundred people at the base of the Sierra Madre range, there was a very specific window of time when their plan would work. It lasted from two-fifteen to around three-thirty.

After two, some drunks were still driving around after the trio of bars in the immediate area closed. There was a bar for every one hundred and fifty residents, which Wylie thought was just about righttwo bars side by side in the tiny village of Riverside, with its population of fifty residents, and one bar in adjoining Encampment. When two oclock finally came around and they closed, ranch hands headed back to their bunkhouses, lumberjacks went home for a few hours of sleep, and unemployed drunks drove off to wherever unemployed drunks went.

Wylie could see the last drinkers of the night through the portal either driving recklessly up McCaffrey or motoring home so slowly and cautiously it was almost comical. Large clouds of condensation coughed out of their tailpipes in the cold, and he could sometimes see the drivers themselves if they were inebriated and had forgotten to shut off their interior dome lights. But he couldnt hear the vehicles because of the roar of the fire. He couldnt hear anything.

The town cop, known as Jalen Spankshed been given the nickname Jalen Spanks (His Monkey) by the regulars at the Bear Trapdid the same routine every night, arriving at three-thirty. Often, Wylie would emerge from his burn shack and wave hello. In return, Jalen would raise two fingers from the steering wheel in a reciprocal salute. Sometimes, when it wasnt below zero outside, Jalen would roll down his drivers-side window and ask Wylie how he was doing. Wylie kept his responses pleasant and short. He didnt want to become friends with Jalen the cop, because Jalen the cop was kind of a dick who took himself and the authority his uniform bestowed upon him a little bit too seriously, Wylie thought. Too many small-town cops were like that.