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C. J. Box

Free Fire

PART ONE

YELLOWSTONE ACT, 1872

AN ACT TO SET APART A CERTAIN TRACT OF

LAND LYING NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE

YELLOWSTONE RIVER AS A PUBLIC PARK

Approved March 1, 1872 (17 Stat. 32)

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. . is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a publicpark or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people; and all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same, or any part thereof, except as hereinafter provided,shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom. (U. S. C. , title 16, sec. 21. )

1

Bechler River Ranger Station Yellowstone National Park July 21

A half-hour after clay mccann walked into the backwoods ranger station and turned over his still-warm weapons, after he’d announced to the startled seasonal ranger behind the desk that he’d just slaughtered four campers near Robinson Lake, the nervous ranger said, “Law enforcement will be here any minute. Do you want to call a lawyer?”

McCann looked up from where he was sitting on a rough-hewnbench. The seasonal ranger saw a big man, a soft man with a sunburn already blooming on his freckled cheeks from just that morning, wearing ill-fitting, brand-new outdoor clothes that still bore folds from the packaging, his blood-flecked hands curled in his lap like he wanted nothing to do with them.

McCann said, “You don’t understand. I am a lawyer. ”

Then he smiled, as if sharing a joke.

2

Saddlestring, Wyoming October 5

Joe pickett was fixing a barbed-wire fence on a boulder-strewn hillside on the southwest corner of the LongbrakeRanch when the white jet cleared the mountaintop and halved the cloudless pale blue sky.

He winced as the roar of the engines washed over him and seemed to suck out all sound and complexity from the cold mid-morning, leaving a vacuum in the pummeled silence. Maxine, Joe’s old Labrador, looked at the sky from her pool of shade next to the pickup.

Bud Longbrake Jr. hated silence and filled it immediately. “Damn! I wonder where that plane is headed? It sure is flying low. ” Then he began to sing, poorly, a Bruce Cockburn song from the eighties:

If I had a rocket launcher.

I would not hesitate

The airport, Joe thought but didn’t say, ignoring Bud Jr. , the plane is headed for the airport. He pulled the strand of wire tight against the post to pound in a staple with the hammer end of his fencing tool.

“Bet he’s headed for the airport,” Bud Jr. said, abruptly stopping his song in mid-lyric. “What kind of plane was it, anyway?It wasn’t a commercial plane, that’s for sure. I didn’t see anything painted on the side. Man, it sure came out of nowhere. ”

Joe set the staple, tightened the wire, pounded it in with three hard blows. He tested the tightness of the wire by strummingit with his gloved fingers.