The Bitterroots (Cassie Dewell #4) - C.J. Box

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The Crazy Mountains were on fire and Cassie Dewell sat alone in her car at night on McLeod Street across from the Grand Hotel in Big Timber, Montana, looking for a twenty-four-year-old reprobate known as Antlerhead.

That’s when the call she’d been dreading came on her cell phone.

It was from Rachel Mitchell, the primary defense attorney in the firm of Mitchell-Estrella in Bozeman. It was from Rachel’s personal cell phone rather than from her office, which was unusual in itself. The attorney was working late and it meant a chit had come due.

The call created a stab of cold dread in Cassie’s gut. She didn’t need the distraction of a call from Rachel Mitchell at that moment. A call from her meant Cassie’s life could be altered one way or another. She declined to answer and let it go to voice mail so she could return it later.

*

She brushed crumbs from a half-dozen chocolate-covered mini-donuts from her lap and lifted her gaze from the empty sidewalk that led to the front door of the hotel to the fire on the distant mountain. It was mesmerizing and officially out of control.

The long fire line extended across the entire southern face of the range like an orange zipper. It dipped into canyons and emerged on the other side. It raced down over meadows and plateaus in spots but never broke contact with the extended fire line itself.

Because it was dark, there was no delineation between the fresh fuel in front of the blaze and the smoking cinders behind it. The fire seemed like a living thing, a snake, a nocturnal beast more alive at night than during the day. It burned bright enough that it stained the bellies of low-hanging clouds with pink hues. When Cassie closed her eyes, the fire lingered as if imprinted inside her eyelids.

She could imagine the line of fire eating its way down through the timber and eventually consuming the grassland of the prairie all the way to I-90 and Big Timber itself unless the wind turned it west or south.

Like most of the summer, the September air was thick with smoke. It haloed the few downtown streetlights and she could smell it on her clothing. She had a sore throat from breathing it in all day. On some mornings, she brushed a thin film of white ash from the hood and windshield of her Jeep Cherokee as if it were snow in the winter.

It had been the Summer of Fire in Montana, and it wasn’t over yet.

She thought about how many fires there were—seventeen at last count throughout the state—and how they’d likely keep burning until the snow finally put them out. They could be seen from space. Both the state and federal budget for fighting them had run out of funds in mid-August.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of timber had burned. So much that the numbers no longer had meaning. Several hundred mountain cabins and homes were destroyed and dozens of towns had been evacuated more than once.

Against the backdrop of the Summer of Fire the case for finding Antlerhead seemed very small in the grand scheme of things. She felt small as well.

The phone in her lap chimed and lit up again and Cassie was afraid it was Rachel again. Instead, it was a text message from her fourteen-year-old son Ben, who was home in Bozeman, sixty-one miles to the west.

When R U home?

She replied that it would be a few hours, that he needed to do his homework and go to bed and to not wait up for her.

She’s feeding me brown rice again.

She meaning Cassie’s mother, Isabel, a free spirit and self-proclaimed progressive who had recently returned from North Dakota where she’d been participating in protests against an oil pipeline opposed by indigenous people. Since getting back she’d refused to cook or serve anything white.

Cassie pondered her response. At least Ben was getting dinner when his own mother wasn’t home to prepare a meal. There was that.

Before she could tap something out Ben asked,

Can I ride my bike to McD’s?

It was warm enough outside and Bozeman was safe enough to say yes. McDonald’s was three blocks away. But giving Ben permission to skip Isabel’s meal would undermine her mother’s authority. It would fan the flames on the tension between them that was already smoldering like one of the fires in the mountains.

Cassie texted:

We’ll go there tomorrow.

Ben replied with:

Like U’ll be home for once.

It was followed by an angry face emoji.

Good night. I love you.

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