He nodded. “Yup.” He told her about being placed on administrative leave.

“And pay no attention to my mother. I can guess what she said because I know her. Joe-” Marybeth released his hand and brushed her fingers across his lips. “You are the man I married. I knew what I was signing on for. I’ve never been resentful or angry with what you do for a living, and I know you’re not the kind of man who could give that up. You do what you do because you’re hardwired for it. You get yourself into situations because you have a certain set of standards that are simply beyond her. So pay no attention to her. She’s crazy and without scruples. She doesn’t understand me, or us. So just put her out of your mind. I thought you’d done that years ago.”

“I thought I had, too,” he said. “But she got to me because I was thinking along the same lines.”

“Only because you’re in a hospital bed and you’re confused by what McLanahan told you,” Marybeth said. “You’ll think differently when you’re recovered.”

“I hope so.”

She paused. Then: “I hope you don’t think you need to go back up there after them. The sheriff down in Baggs will catch them. They’ll eventually find them and bring them to justice. You don’t have to make this a personal quest.”

He nodded, but he didn’t mean it.

She kissed him goodnight and ignored the nurse filling the doorway and looking at her watch as a means of advising them visiting hours were over.

Before she left the room, he said, “Thank you for what you said.”

She smiled painfully and said she’d be back in the morning.

At 3:15 A.M., Joe slid his legs out from under the blankets and eased out of the bed. His leg wounds were tightly bound, but the movement caused sharp needle-like pains that zapped up into his abdomen and belly. He paused at the doorway to get his breath back and pulled on a pair of boxers so his buttocks weren’t bare out of the back of the duck-covered cotton gown.

The hallway was quiet and dimly lit. The nurse station was to his right, so he padded left in his open-backed hospital slippers. Hugging the wall so he couldn’t be seen by the night nurse, he slid along the slick block wall to the end of the hallway and the elevators. Two floors up was ICU.

George Pickett was in room 621. Joe paused before going in and tried to gather strength and resolve. He had no idea what he would find inside.

He eased into the room and stood with his back to the wall near the door, out of sight in case a nurse or aide walked by and glanced in.

Dim blue-white neon lights lit George on his bed. Dozens of tubes curled up and away from his body into the gloom. Bags of clear liquid hung over him. It was as if his father were a long-forgotten potato gone to root in a dark pantry.

Joe shuffled closer. His father looked like a skeleton wrapped in loose latex, as if his yellow skin could slough off of the bones into a pile on the linoleum if he were jostled. Joe froze in mid-breath when George’s eyes shot open and his father’s head turned on his pillow toward him.

“Dad?”

George said, “What I could really use right now, son, is a drink.” His voice was reedy and dry.

“Hello, Dad. How are you doing?”

“Give me a drink.”

Joe reached out for the water bottle on the tray table and his father’s face folded in on itself in a grotesque scowl. “Not that! I said I wanted a drink!”

“Ah,” Joe said.

His father’s rheumy eyes looked at something above and to the left of Joe, but the scowl remained.

“I can’t,” Joe said.

“Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Joe.”

“Joe? I had a son named Joe.”

“That’s me,” he said, feeling his heart break.

“You’re my son, but you won’t give me a drink?” George rasped. “Then what the hell good are you?”

And with that, he died.

Joe heard an alarm burr at the nurse station, and he stepped back and aside as an emergency team rushed into the room and surrounded George’s body, which seemed to have deflated even more. Despite the chatter of the attendants, he could hear the pneumatic cack-cack-cackof his father’s death rattle, and he couldn’t shake the thought that his dad was getting in one last laugh.

Dave Farkus had spent most of his adult life working hard to avoid hard work. His philosophy was to save himself for pursuits he favored-hunting, fishing, poker, snowmobiling, mountain man rendezvous reenactments, and blasting through the mountains on his 4 x 4 ATV.

Avoiding hard work required discipline and a complete awareness of his surroundings, as well as an intuitive sense of when to be in the wrong place when extra time or effort was demanded. Like golf or fly-fishing, it was a lifelong pursuit that he knew he might never perfect but he could certainly continue to improve. When his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Ardith, suggested bitterly he consider writing a pamphlet on the techniques he employed to maintain his lifestyle, Farkus told her it would be too much work.

Before everyone had been laid off from the natural-gas pipeline company, he’d been supremely skillful at the art of slipping into the men’s room or taking a break moments before the shift supervisor entered the shop to outline new assignments or ask for volunteers for a big new job. When dirty and grueling tasks were demanded, like sandblasting old valves or replacing blown motors in pump units, Farkus expertly anticipated when the jobs would have to take place, due to his intimate knowledge of the industry and workplace, and would schedule a dentist appointment or mandatory drug test for that day.

It was easier to game the system in his new job working for the county. Bureaucracy was made for shirking, and he felt kind of stupid it had taken so many years to settle into his true calling. Today, for example, he’d gotten a tip that all the bus drivers would have to go into the garage and assist a contract cleaning crew on a top-to-bottom scrubbing of the vehicles. Which is why he’d taken a personal day to go over the mountains to try to spot-weld his marriage back together instead.

Dave Farkus always figured there would be high-intensity brown-noses who would take on the tough jobs and want to be heroes. He let them. Part of his philosophy was that it was as important to have slackers as to have go-getters within every work crew. For balance.

Additionally, in the thirty years since he’d graduated from high school (barely), he’d made it a point to avoid anything to do with horses, like ranch work. Horses were unpredictable, prone to break down, and involved after-hours maintenance. So after three hours of riding up into the timber nose-to-tail with the four men and their horses, he said, “So, if we find whatever it is you’re looking for, will you let me go home?”

Which made the red-haired rider in black, named M. Whitney Parnell, according to the nametag on his rifle scabbard, snort and exchange looks with Smith. Farkus gathered from observation that Parnell was in charge of the whole operation. Smith, and the two camo-clad men, the tall thin one with the nose named Campbell and the blond man named Capellen, were subservient to Parnell.

Parnell rode out ahead, followed by Smith. It was necessary to ride single-file because the trail was narrow and trees hemmed in both sides. Farkus rode a fat sorrel horse in the middle. Behind him were Campbell, Capellen, and the two packhorses.

“You see,” Farkus explained, “I’m just thinking my role here is to help you out because I know these mountains and you don’t, but if in the end you’re not going to let me go, well, you know what I’m saying. Where’s my motivation, you know?”

This time, Smith snorted derisively and touched the butt of his rifle. “Here’s your motivation.”

Farkus craned around in his saddle to see if the riders behind him were more sympathetic. Campbell simply glared at him, his face a mask of contempt. Capellen, though, looked miserable. His face was bone-china white and his eyes were rimmed with red. He clutched the saddle horn with both hands as if to remain mounted.