“So, what brought you two out here in this storm?” Landry shifted uncomfortably in the old wooden chair and talked barely above a whisper.
“Just trying to get the cattle on our ranch down closer to the headquarters before it really socked us in.”
Zeke sat back and took another swallow from the whiskey bottle and handed it in a familiar way to Landry.
“Looks like you were runnin’ a little late.” Landry chuckled weakly.
“Looks that way. How ‘bout you?” Zeke never looked up but just stared down into the fire, as if his question was simply casual conversation.
Landry was quiet for a full minute.
He’d come out there to get the money and take it back without anyone knowing. He wasn’t sure how he was going do it, but that had been the plan. He was shamed enough in the last year and now he had done something so outside of who he really was that he was ashamed of that too. To top it off, now he was going to put the final nail in his “loser coffin” by failing at trying to undo what he had done. Yet for all the decisions he had made over the last three days, this one was the only one he knew was the right decision.
He simply had to follow through with it and put himself back on a path that was true to who he really was and where he really wanted to be.
But he was sick as hell, stranded in a cabin with two people he didn’t know and he wasn’t sure how he was going to get to the bank.
He looked over at the two women who were struggling to open a can of tomatoes with a pocketknife. He still felt like hell but was more awake than he’d been when they were still in the storm.
He didn’t know why, but there was something about the two that he trusted and that was odd for him. There was hardly anyone he’d trusted after everything that had happened in the last year. Something deep in his gut, though, told him he was safe. And if he still wanted to get the money back without anyone else knowing, he’d need help now.
When he thought about it, there was only one thing that made this circumstance different than every other one he had been in for the last year. He wasn’t alone in this one.
He felt like one of those people he’d seen on television who bungee-jumped and had to gather enough courage to leap.
“Well,” He paused for another long moment. “I robbed the bank.”
He said it quietly, followed by a deep sigh afterward. His heart pounded in his chest. He wasn’t sure if it was the statement he made at that moment or the snake venom making its way through his body.
“We know,” Zeke said, speaking for Tawny too.
Landry didn’t react but looked up, his head pounding in time with his throbbing hand.
“That doesn’t surprise me, that you know, I mean. But I ain’t runnin’ from it. I ain’t what you think I am.”
“Well, I’m not what I seem either. I guess none of us is. ‘Cept right now, to a lot a people, yer damn sure a bank robber.”
“I know, but I had a plan to fix it. I look at it now, that thing I did and I don’t recognize myself. I don’t even know why I did it.”
“I done a few things like that myself.” Zeke took another swallow and handed the bottle back to Landry. “But I can’t say I ever robbed a bank and ‘specially on horseback. That took balls. Stupid balls, yes but ballsy balls, just the same.”
Zeke chuckled now and Tawny and Tippi quietly stopped their activity and listened too.
“What’s your plan?”
“As crazy as it is, I had planned to take the money and sneak it back in there with a note.”
Zeke just looked at the man, his eyes wide. He walked to the fireplace and tapped all ten fingers on the hearth.
“Sounds just certifiably nuts enough to work,” Zeke said finally. “But you and I got other problems.”
Landry looked up at him, his eyes narrowed and for the first time, he felt threatened. Tawny stiffened too. What? What’s he talking about? Why did the two of them have problems? Would this day never end?
Zeke was quiet and looked back into the fire while he considered his next move. If he was honest and told them all his whole reason for being in Cheyenne, Oklahoma was not to work on this ranch but to capture and turn in the very man before him, he didn’t know what would happen.
Worse than that, for the first time in two years he wasn’t sure what he wanted to have happen.
Zeke knew Thornton and Alder would be impatiently waiting for him to call right now. If another day went by, they’d start putting the pressure on him about finding this guy and maybe even come for him.
If he wanted to, he could talk this guy into turning himself in and then he’d be able to leave this place just like he had all the others in the past two years.
But he knew what’d happen. He’d leave and they’d send him down the road to the next assignment and his life would continue this downward spiral.
He looked at the three people before him and wondered how the hell he got here, to this place where he was turning into someone who waffled on things.
Something ate at him. It was the same something that had been eating at him for the last five months. He was sick of it, this life. He was sick of knowing that the agents – one of them anyway – that one named Thornton was getting worse and it would only be a matter of time before they’d ask him to kill.
Now, sitting in this cabin with a quarter of a bottle of whiskey down, something about Landry was likable, he could see why the man made a good Sheriff. He guessed at least the whiskey was predictable and in this case it was also helpful.
He obviously believed in the good part of folks or he wouldn’t have trusted Zeke. And yet, Zeke found himself in a way he couldn’t fully understand within this broken man, who’d spent his life trying to do right and got nothing for it.
Zeke wasn’t sure what that must be like. He’d spent his own life avoiding people, just minding his own business, staying for months at a time out in the wilds of someone’s ranch.
Living like that makes you tough but requires nothin’. It’s not like being a lawman where self-sacrifice and having people in your face is a daily event.
Now, for the first time in his life, he must choose right or wrong and there would be a cost either way. He looked at them, all waiting on him to say what he had to say.
“Our problem is…” he began and sighed deeply. “How’r we gonna get in there, leave the money where it won’t be re-stolen by someone else and outta there without being seen.”
Tawny rolled her eyes and shook her head in disbelief.
“K, so what you’re sayin’ is, we are all gonna risk our necks and help put this back?”
“Well, at this point, if you disagree, you’re the only holdout.” Zeke turned and looked at her standing behind him with her hands on the back of the wooden chair. The calf struggled to its feet and turned toward them all and bawled.
Tawny looked at Tippi.
“And you, I know you. You’re that reporter. He shot you. Just how do you reconcile yourself to this and just how, pray tell, did you get involved in it?”
She sat on the hearth and put her head in her hands.
“Oh, Sugar Britches…now whatcha gonna do?” Zeke leaned forward in his chair when he said it. “Ain’t no ranch for you to run to and hide at now. Now, yer gonna have to get yer hands dirty. Yer gonna either make a stand against us for what you think is right and we won’t stop ya. Or yer gonna have to get all in and stand up for what you choose.”
“I guess I’d like to know a little more about how he got himself in the mess to begin with. Can we at least have a little explanation please.”
Landry sat up and fixed his blurry vision on Tawny.
“I can’t make no explanation. Won’t even try. I was tryin’, I guess, to get back at the town fer believin’ all that crap and now, I guess I thought the town owed me something somehow for all the years I put into it. But I know now, no one owes me nuthin.”
“Most criminals have to face their crimes head on Mr. Former Sheriff. Fer Pete’s sakes, you shot her,” Tawny said, pointing to Tippi. “You scared those people in the bank half to death, and you stole $200,000 from the bank. Hell, it was my bank!”
Landry just shook his head.
“You know, I made a life outta servin’ this town. I really served it and had its best interest at my heart for the 12 years I was the sheriff here.”
Landry looked at them, fully awake for the first time and feeling better, oddly, since doing the robbery.
“No one in this room, at least I think I am right, knows what it is like to have nothing but the best intentions and actions toward a town and then to have someone who has power just ruin you.” He stood up and faced them all.
“It’s hard to imagine, and I never knew, that someone could just take their power and ruin a person like that. I used to believe in justice. The good would win out over the bad. But that is not what happened.”
Landry wavered a bit where he stood but held onto the back of the wooden chair, he had been sitting in just seconds before.
“They used their power and without even blinkin’ ruined my life and all to get their man into office.”
Tippi, feeling more defensive now for Landry than ever before, decided it was time to speak up.
“What about what he’s already been through? What he wasn’t guilty of? Was that justice?” It was Tippi’s small voice trailed off, smaller and smaller as the sentence ended.
“Ok,” Tawny said. “You gotta point. I never did believe he was a part of that oil theft thing.”
“What do ya think they’re gonna do if he turns himself in?” Finding her voice more, Tippi stepped forward and talked in the center of the group.
“I know,” Tawny said. “They’ll tar-n-feather him. Especially since he was already marked by the lies.”
“They still do that here?” Zeke asked the question as more of a break in the seriousness of the mood.
“And that congressman and his son-in-law will use it to their advantage and Landry won’t have a chance in hell of defending himself from the original bogus charges.”
Tawny realized in that moment, which seemed to be surrounded by another serious problem, that she had indeed run away from life back to the ranch, just as her father had run from the ranch all those years ago. She had done the running instead of making a stand for it.
Suddenly, she understood why her father didn’t talk to her. It was because she reminded him of himself, his own failings, his own fear, and his own flight. She thought she had been courageous that day, telling everyone she was leaving her calling as an attorney. However, really, she knew that the isolation of the ranch was nothing more than an addiction, requiring nothing from her but her physical presence and sacrifice. She never had to invest emotionally with someone, was never forced to get out of herself and feel someone’s pain as she would have working as a lawyer. Most importantly she would never have to feel at all.
It had all gone to her preference for the safety of the nothingness that isolation brings. She looked at this band of misfits before her and knew they had not all ended up out there, stranded in a blizzard together without some help from a God who she was sure had a pretty keen sense of humor.
All the normal logical and safe arguments she used to justify every mediocre, safe life decision she had made in the past four years swirled in her mind. But for the first time she gathered herself and took a risk.
“Oh, the hell with it, okay, I’m in.”
“They’re in there, and it’s warm in there, look at the smoke coming out of the chimney. Come on Thornton, let’s just drop this and hook up with them and call it good, we’re about dead.” Adler sneezed again and blew his nose, now as red as the wool scarf he had tied around his neck.
His hands fumbled clumsy and thick with his handkerchief.
He was walking around the horses and looking at them, noticing there was three instead of two.
“Look dumbass, if it were up to you, we’da let Scarlotti go too and look what we found out about what he had planned for us after we got him,” Thornton checked his clip in his 9 mm and then pushed carefully past the horses as he spoke.
This was the first time he had ever been anywhere near the huge animals, and he didn’t care for them.
“Did they have three horses or just two?”
“I don’t know, Ahhhhh-chew!” Snot sprayed the back of Thornton’s wool coat.
“Damn Adler, you are disgusting.”
Thornton reached toward a worn set of saddlebags on Zeke’s horse, unbuckled them and searched the contents.
“He has his pistol,” he said.
“Man, what are you thinking? You just gonna pop him out here with someone else to witness it?” Adler scratched his forehead using his knit cap.
“How are we gonna keep anyone from seeing us or hearing us?”
“That’s why we have silencers Agent Adler,” Thornton said and glared at his partner. “So we can take our mark out and be on our way before anyone else knows the difference.”
Thornton folded his arms and turned and faced Adler.
“Look, do I need to remind you that it is time for us to cut our losses? We’ve handled this C.I. longer than we have any of the others because he was good at it and it got us those convictions we needed with little effort,” Thornton said. “Might I remind you that you too were taking vacations and enjoying the good life that was paid for by some of our scores.”
“Yeah, but to kill him? That seems excessive. Why not just cut him loose. I think all he wants now is to be gone from all this.”
“But he knows about what we did to the Mainner family and he knows about the people on the Gonzalez jury. Don’t forget that and Frank Adler, you’re the one who gave that order.” Thornton shifted his weight onto another foot that wasn’t as frozen and thumped his arms on his sides to warm up.
“We shudda taken care of this a while back.”
Thornton turned away from Adler and sidled to the corner of the shed and peered cautiously around the corner toward the cabin.
In the dark, he soaked in the scene. The snow still fell. One dim light flickered in a window.
“You’re killin’ me with this paranoia,” Adler said and honked loud and hard into his handkerchief again.
“You know, you’re right about one thing,” Thornton said and turned eerily back toward his partner.
“What’s that,” Adler asked and then his eyes widened.
“Did you hear something?” Tawny glanced at the door from her place at the table. “Like a pop or something?”
“Yeah, I hear the wind still blowing, like it’s done since the day I got here,” Zeke said.
Zeke chuckled, but looked out the small window and then returned to the table.
“Probably that tree growing near the shed. It looked pretty weighed down by the snow.
“Probably.”
The group sat silently watching the fire; each thinking of a unique plan to return the money to the bank.
“Tawny, you know how to get around here better n any of us. How far are we from town here?” Zeke turned in his chair when he asked the question.
“Well, that’s the funny thing. Now I know where I am because there’s a huge butte south of us. If you cross right over the top of that, you can be in Cheyenne in less than a mile.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know why they made the roads the way they did. By the roads, it’s five miles.”
“We need to do it before light or when someone just thinks we are there for normal business,” Tippi added.
“We can’t do that.” Zeke acted impatient. “The cops are set up on that bank watching for exactly this kind of thing. I know it surprises you but there is a shitload of people who return to the scenes of their crimes; and that’s how they catch ‘em.”
Tawny cut her eyes at Zeke and considered him for a moment while he continued to talk.
“We gotta go in the pitch black so we can cover our face and throw something over that camera at the night deposit. Then, we just ride up as fast as we can, stuff the money in and be gone.”
“Well, then we better start that way now,” Tawny said. She stood and glanced nervously out the window. “With this snow, we will never get there before light otherwise.”
“Well, we can’t all go.” Zeke said and looked down at the floor while he devised a plan.
“Just one of us should ride all the way down to the bank while one hangs back and the other two should stay back here and wait.”
The group stood for a moment and stared at each other.
Each realized Landry was in no shape to make the ride. Tawny quietly contemplated whether she could handle it or for that matter, her horse. Her gray had begun limping a bit as the day had progressed and she knew he had a shoe that was loose.
She stepped to the window to see if the snow had let up at all. It was deep; and would require her knowledge of the terrain.
“I guess I know the way, I should go.”
“Wait a minute, you mean I am going to hand this money over to someone I just met and hope they take it and put it back?”
Landry shook his head.
“I should take it or go with it.”
Tawny was incredulous.
“Oh really? So, you feel you can unload this secret on us, ask us to help you and burden us to bury this in our souls the rest of our lives, but you can’t trust one of us to make the delivery?”
The group fell quiet again and looked at Landry and then back to Tawny like they were watching a tennis match.
Finally, Zeke spoke up.
“She’s right.” Zeke turned and faced Landry. “And you don’t know how it pains me to say that. First of all, it ain’t that much money. You might a been a great Sheriff but as far as bank heists go, you’re not that impressive. Sorry man.”
Landry smiled for the first time that night.
“You don’t say?” He laughed and Zeke went on with his speech.
“Secondly, you’re really not in a position to complain about whether or not you trust us. If that was the case, you shoulda thought of that before you unloaded on us and thirdly, I was just starting to like you until you started talkin’ like that, so shuddup.”
Zeke didn’t offer the man any other chances to respond.
“Tawny, you, and I gotta go. You know the way and this girl here, Tilly or what ever-her-name is can’t ride. And them boots she’s wearin’ are starting to make me feel a little dizzy. Besides she needs to be here to take care of him, cause I ain’t no nurse.”
Zeke dug in his pocket and pulled out an antique Case XX knife that looked like it had been around the world.
“This is my father’s knife. I have had it since my father gave it to me when I became a cowboy and left for an operation in Australia. It may not seem like a fair bounty for $200,000 to you, but to me, it’s worth more than that.” Zeke hesitated for a moment and gave Landry a hard look. “You hold it and give it back to me when we get back.”
“Good nough,” Landry said. “$200,000 for a worn-out knife.”
He soaked in the character of the man who stood before him. It was as if there was something else making him do this risky thing and yet, he couldn’t read it in his face. He thought how strange it was that he had spent years in what he had believed was serving the people of his small town but had not learned anything about how to really know anyone.
He figured, now that he thought of it, that fact was probably true about the others in the town. They didn’t really know him either and that was why they had been able to believe those lies, he reasoned now.
The truth was, he was as guilty of living in a cocoon as they had been.
Zeke and Tawny began putting their coats and chaps back on; preparing for a journey, about which each was both never surer…and never more unsure.
