Off the Grid by C. J. Box Page B

thing for me, Joe, I’ll take a hard look at your situation and start suing those bastards. If nothing else, we’ll get a settlement so you don’t go bankrupt for no good reason.”
    Joe was taken aback.
    “Thank you.”
    Allen’s man with the clipboard was now standing three feet away. He wanted Rulon’s attention. Rulon refused to look over.
    “You’re a good man, Joe. You’ve got a great wife and a wonderful family. You’ve worked hard for me and you’ve taken on risks youdidn’t need to take. This is the least I can do. We’ll get those political hacks to squeal.”
    “Governor Rulon, a moment of your time?” the man with the clipboard insisted.
    Rulon patted Joe on the shoulder, meaning they were done talking. Joe’s questions would have to wait, like
Where in the Red Desert?
The area was huge.
    “What?” Rulon asked the campaign staffer.
    Colter Allen shouldered past his man. He didn’t even acknowledge Joe. “Spencer, I was wondering if you wanted to say a few words before my speech?”
    Rulon squinted up his face with distaste. “Hell no.”
    “Will you at least come up there and stand with me? You know, for pictures?”
    Joe looked back and forth, to the governor and future governor, as if watching a tennis match.
    “Absolutely not.”
    Allen’s face fell.
    “I’m here,” Rulon said. “That’s enough.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “If you keep asking, I might accept and end up saying something you don’t want said.”
    Allen seemed at a loss for words.
    At that moment in the front of the room, Joe heard Marybeth’s familiar voice say, “I’m Marybeth Pickett, the director of the Twelve Sleep County Library. Today we’d like to welcome Mr. Colter Allen, who is running for governor and who has enthusiastically endorsed our local one-cent tax for a new expansion of the library . . .”
    Joe watched as Allen put his game face on and turned and strodetoward the podium as if the conversation he’d had with Rulon hadn’t taken place.
    “I’m not sure what he’s going to be like,” Rulon said sotto voce to Joe. “Everybody thinks it’s an easy job until they get behind that desk. He might have been happier just strutting around Big Piney country thinking he knew all the answers. I just hope he doesn’t listen too much to his donors and screw things up in this state.”
    Joe barely heard what Rulon said. He was already thinking about going south to find Nate Romanowski.
    He had a guilt-ridden feeling of excitement about a new assignment outside of his normal duties. He knew he was always at his best—and sometimes his worst—when he was forced out of his district and comfort zone.
    What, he wondered, did the feds suspect was going on down there? It had to be more than reselling marijuana purchased legally in Colorado, although that was certainly starting to become a problem.
    And what had Nate been recruited to do?

10
    That evening in Laramie, under the light of a used banker’s lamp she’d found at a flea market, twenty-two-year-old Sheridan Pickett sealed the envelope containing a belated birthday card. She needed a stamp to send it. She wasn’t sure she even had one.
    She’d texted her father on his birthday and he’d replied
Thanks!
the next day. He wasn’t much for texting. She hoped he’d appreciate the card. On the cover it said:
    There was a dad who had a daughter,
    Swung her,
    Chased her,
    Caught her.
    And on the inside it read:
    Oh, what happiness he brought her!
    Except that she’d messed up the rhyme by penning
Not to mention teaching her how to fish, drive, and stand up for herself
before the
Oh, what happiness he brought her
line.
    She liked it, although he really wasn’t one for cards, either.
    She rooted through her drawer looking for stamps and piled the items she found in it on top of the desk: rubber bands, ticket stubs, several old thumb drives, her freshman student ID when she’d lived in the dorms, a can of pepper spray her dad had given