Hard Winter

Book 2: Montana

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Westerns

Synopsis

From bestselling authors William W. and J.A. Johnstone comes the latest installment in a bold, new, generations-spanning saga of the American West set in historical Montana territory.

Two Families. Two Dynasties. Two Centuries.

A Saga of Montana.

Bestselling authors William W. Johnstone and J. A. Johnstone return to Cutthroat County in their Montana series, following the Maddox and Drew families from the time they struggled to plant their roots in the 1800s to the twenty-first century trials they endure to maintain their legacies.

NOW

As winter descends upon Cutthroat County, rancher Ashton Maddox has to rely on a skeleton crew to keep his cattle from succumbing to the dangers of the cold winter months. County Sheriff John T. Drew has his hands full this time of year heading up search and rescue missions for adventurous snowborders and skiers tempting fate on nearby Always Winter mountain range. When an unexpected blizzard covers the region, Drew finds himself babysitting a vicious gang of prisoners stranded in town. And as the storm triggers avalanches, Drew and Maddox learn their son and daughter are trapped on the mountain—and that the gang’s leader has escaped from custody . . .
 
THEN
 
This isn’t the first Montana blizzard that the Drew and Maddox families have faced. Back in 1894, Murdo Maddox lost his livestock—and nearly his entire cowboy crew—braving a treacherous storm that ravaged the countryside. Sheriff Napoleon Drew pursued a mad dog killer across the unforgiving snow and ice. Both men risked their lives to save others, fighting the most devastating weather conjured by nature—and the worst in human nature . . .

Release date: September 24, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

The numbing wind kept blowing stinging snow and ice at the main base for the Always Winter Downhill Run, and John T. Drew and his son had been working most of the day covering the portable grandstands with tarps, securing them firmly so it would not take fourteen hours of shoveling snow and ice to make them ready for what few spectators, mostly parents of the younger kids, who had enough gumption to drive up to this bitterly cold wasteland in the name of fun and entertainment and athletes pushing their limits.

Finishing the knot, Drew felt mighty glad that he had been able to tie it with thickly gloved hands. Last year, he’d dang near came close to getting frostbite when he had to remove the winterproof gloves to get that last tiedown tight enough. At least that’s how he felt, anyway.

Billy said something, but Drew could not read his son’s lips, since he could not see the boy’s face through the three-hole, full-face ski mask and frosty ski goggles.

Billy pointed to the Interceptor. He said something, and Drew figured Billy said it could wait till they were in the SUV—maybe ten minutes after the heater could be felt—because he shrugged and went back to tying his end down.

Nodding, Drew went back to work, too. This storm wasn’t supposed to last long, and another storm moving down from Alberta was expected to bypass Basin Creek and most of the county. That would be good for the thirteen men and women, mostly boys and girls, who had signed up to compete in this year’s annual event that attracted kids and a few adults with more polar bear and musk ox in their blood to think this was a fun thing to do to start off a new year.

The stands, which came from the high school football field, also were rented for the Fourth of July rodeo each year. Drew liked the rodeo better than this catastrophe of an event. But at least the only media covering this year’s annual display of Cutthroat County craziness was some high school kid dumb enough to come up for the ten bucks Carl Lorimer would pay him to write up an article and take photographs for the Basin River Weekly Item and maybe the girl from Big Sky Monthly Magazine—providing she didn’t turn chicken-livered (or wise beyond her years), hang a sharp U-turn, and skedaddle back to the low country of Yellowstone County, where the high today, according to the Weather Channel this morning, was expected to be a balmy twenty-six degrees. The year ESPN and Sports Illustrated decided to give the event publicity had been nothing more than complete insanity.

Straightening, Drew beat the snow and ice off his gloves and looked at his son, who had finished his job.

“What do you think?” he shouted over the wind.

“I’d say it’s good enough.” Billy yelled that loud enough to hear.

“I figured you would.” With a grin that Billy couldn’t see because of Drew’s own winter wraps, Drew hooked a thumb toward the Interceptor. “Let’s get lower than two miles elevation.”

The SUV started and the heat blasted them as they shed parkas, masks, and wet gloves, which they tossed into the back seat. The defroster began melting the windshield ice, and Drew opened a thermos of hot chocolate, which was only lukewarm by now, and handed it to his son, then buckled himself in.

“What is it that those sheepdogs carry in Switzerland?”

Drew rubbed the feeling back into his hands, then turned toward his son.

“Sheepdogs?”

“You know what I mean!”

“Saint Bernards. And it’s brandy.”

“Well. Brandy would be better than this.”

“You’ve never had brandy.” Drew laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever had brandy.” It did sound warm, though. He hit the wipers, which cleared off enough melting mush so he could see. “What was it you asked me back there?”

He thanked his son when he passed the thermos, then drank some weak hot chocolate made from a mix—and lukewarm was an overstatement.

“Nothing.” Billy took the thermos his father held back toward him.

“What was it you asked?”

His son, who had finished the first semester of his junior year at the University of Wyoming, sighed. “I was just wondering if you thought Mr. Maddox would be coming up to the run.”

Drew couldn’t hide his grin.

“A Maddox making a Drew nervous?” Before Billy could complain, Drew added, “Your grandfathers and great-grandfathers are turning over in their graves.”

Billy changed the subject. “How much is the county paying me for helping you out today, by the way?”

“Nothing. The Always Winter Downhill Run is a five-oh-one-C-three. You know what that is, or do they teach those things for youngsters studying outdoor recreation and tourism management?”

“It’s a nonprofit. Sorta like being a county sheriff, I guess.”

Drew laughed. “Nonprofits make more money, son.”

He shifted the SUV into reverse, backing up and hearing the ice crunch under the tires, turning the wheels sharply, then putting the Ford into first gear. Drew never liked driving down from what some people considered a ski resort but he thought of as more of a death trap. He kept the Interceptor in low four-wheel drive and never topped fifteen miles an hour for the first nerve-wracking few miles downhill.

They didn’t talk. Not now. Though keeping one hand on the gearshift, Drew practically hugged the steering wheel and stared at the whiteness in front of him.

“I thought this storm was supposed to miss us,” Billy said after a while.

“That’s what the weatherman at Great Falls said,” Drew whispered, before biting his lower lip as he downshifted but kept his foot on the brake pedal on a hairpin turn.

The forecast might still be right. Town was about sixty-five hundred feet lower, and it might be clear as a July morning when they climbed off this mountain, though it would still be freezing.

Brandy, he thought. Maybe he would try some when they reached Basin Creek. He wondered if they had that on the back bar at the Busted Stirrup.

When they reached an elevation too low for aspens and the snow and sleet lessened and the visibility rose, he breathed a bit easier, but he still kept his eyes focused on the road and the SUV in four-wheel drive.

“I saw Alyson Maddox at the grocery yesterday,” he said.

Billy waited a long moment before responding: “Who?”

“Alyson Maddox. Does she ski?”

“Snowboards.” Billy quickly added. “Or so I hear tell.”

“Guess she came up on vacation or comp time.”

“Flights might be all grounded at DIA,” Billy suggested.

Drew tried not to snicker at that bit of logic from a junior, third-string catcher for the Wyoming Cowboys. He didn’t say that George Grimes had told Drew that he had seen Billy and Alyson at Mack McDonald’s beaver pond, oh, roughly two hours after Drew had held the door open for her as she left Outlaw Grocery & Liquor with a shopping bag full of apples, cookies, and napkins—like she was going on a picnic. In winter.

His smile faded. Times like this, he really wished his wife were still alive. Boys, even college-age juniors, could talk to their mothers about girls and such. He wondered what Rebecca, killed in a single-car accident, would have told Billy. Alyson Maddox is a pretty girl, smart, and . . . how many years older than you? You’d be wise to court her. Or: This isn’t a fairy tale, son. And you’d best remember that Drews and Maddoxes haven’t been on social terms in something like one hundred and eighty years.

He tried to think of some wise counsel he could offer Billy. Then he waited for his son to say something. The only sounds were from an icy mix pelting the Interceptor and snow crunching beneath the SUV’s tires and chains.

“You don’t think they’d cancel the run, do you?” Billy asked after a lengthy silence.

Drew breathed easier.

“Depends, as always, on weather.” He laughed at an almost forgotten memory. “They canceled it when I was ten years old. That was when the only events were skiing and snowshoeing. My daddy, your granddaddy, was sheriff then. Chuckie Corvallis and Fergie Trent decided they were going up to compete anyway.”

Billy perked up. “Mr. Corvallis . . . that old man who smokes like a chimney—and the game warden?”

“Chuckie only smoked a pack a day back then. And it was Trent’s daddy. He wasn’t a game warden, but I imagine whoever was the game warden then would have loved to have stopped that old poacher.”

His son’s face brightened. “You’re kidding.”

Drew shook his head and focused on the road.

“Someone tipped Daddy off. Even back then, Chuckie couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and Daddy cussed and cussed and said he ought to let those two stay up on those mountains till the snow melted, and then he’d let the buzzards and silvertips have them for supper. There wasn’t a search and rescue outfit, per se, back then, so Daddy had to round up anyone he could find, and they drove up in the county’s dump truck.”

He remembered pleading with his father to let him ride up there with them. John had always wanted to ride in a dump truck, but his father was as mad as Drews could get. Then, seeing how worried his mother was, John had started fearing the worst things that could happen. Mostly that those silvertip bears and carrion would be feasting on his father and the three cowpunchers he had pulled out of what was then Jimbo Bell’s two-bit bar—Monty, the oldest boy, had turned that into a grocery and liquor store when he learned that he couldn’t compete with the Wild Bunch and Busted Stirrup.

John relayed what he remembered, leaving out his own fears, smiling and picturing what must have been going on inside that dump truck as his hard rock of a father and three drunken cowhands went up this very road, only back then it wasn’t paved.

“What happened?” Billy asked when John paused to get around the last hairpin turn.

“It was right about here that Daddy found them.” He pointed as much as he could toward the left-hand side of the road. “Slid into a snowbank. Trent had stolen his father’s Chevy pickup. Kids didn’t even put chains on the tires.

“They had tried to walk up the rest of the way, then gave up and were snowshoeing down when they saw the lights of the dump truck.

“Well, Daddy scared the crap out of them, then made them climb into the back of the dump truck. Said there wasn’t room for them up front, and there probably wasn’t. Not with those cowhands and Daddy, who was about the size of a three-year-old Brahman bull. I’m surprised they weren’t frozen solid by the time Daddy pulled into Basin Creek.”

John shook his head and chuckled.

“The newspaper printed the next week that Fergie Trent won that year’s Downhill championship. Since when Sheriff Drew stopped the truck, hit the lever, and emptied the bed, Fergie was the first one through the dump gate.”

They both laughed.

“Is that true?” Billy asked. “Or did you make it up?”

“I don’t have the gift of gab that your granddaddy had,” John answered. “But it’s in the bound volumes of the old newspapers at the library. Look it up yourself.”

“That’s funny,” Billy said.

John nodded. “Folks talked about that for years.” He wondered how stories like that got lost over time, but the violent stories of Cutthroat County went on forever. Well, maybe he could understand that after all. He remembered all those Wild West stories. The funny ones didn’t come so clear after a few months or so. He was surprised he even managed to dig up that one.

“I don’t think either of them could sit for a week after their dads got through with them.”

It was good to hear his son laugh with him. After all, with what Billy had been through this past summer, being kidnapped along with Alyson Maddox by that deadly hired assassin, John had worried that, once the adrenaline wore off, Billy would falter, flounder, fall apart. But his grades had been solid, Bs all the way around in five classes this past semester, and he had looked pretty good in fall baseball practice. Probably would hold on to his job as bullpen catcher, maybe get a bit more playing time since last season’s backup had transferred to a smaller school in South Dakota, the freshman signee had decided to play pro ball in Mexico, and the starter was battling a hamstring injury.

“Wanna grab something to eat for an early supper?” John asked.

“Sure. Where you thinking?”

John smiled. “Not that chophouse in Bozeman. Our options are limited.” He wasn’t about to drive to Medicine Pass to eat at Jimmie’s Chinese. John had thought about grilling steaks, but after getting those stands weatherproofed for the crazy run scheduled for Saturday, he really didn’t want to be outside in a biting Montana wind any more than he had to.

“Guess the Wild Bunch,” Billy said. “Maybe I can ask Mr. Corvallis if that story you told me is true.”

A retort had not formed in John’s mind when the Interceptor’s radio crackled. Someone was calling the sheriff’s office emergency line.

“Cutthroat County Sheriff’s Department.” He heard Mary Broadbent answer the call, which automatically went to all units. It had to be a local call. 9-1-1 calls were relayed to Cut Bank in Glacier County.

“Yeah.” The sound of glass breaking came through clearer than the voice. “Two cowhands are tearing up the Busted Stirrup.” The next noise sounded like wood breaking, and the caller cursed, cried out, then swore some more. After a string of blasphemy, the voice demanded, “If you don’t get someone over here, I’m breaking out my sixteen-gauge pump.”

“Calm down, Bull,” Mary told the bartender, Bull Resnick. At least that joint’s owner, Cindy Kristiansen, who also ran the Basin Creek Apartments, wasn’t working. She wouldn’t have called the sheriff’s department. She would have already had that shotgun in her hands. “I’ll call Derrick Taylor now.”

Good girl, Drew thought. Taylor was constable for Basin Creek, so a barroom brawl at the Busted Stirrup fell in his jurisdiction, though the county sheriff’s department often assisted in things like this.

“That piece of lard drove up to Havre this morning to see his ex-wife!” Resnick followed that with a booming string of profanity. “Why the . . .”—The next bit of profanity was garbled by static, breaking glass, and curses—“called you?”

Call Denton Creel, Drew silently mouthed. Be smart, Mary. Be smart.

Before Mary could respond, the bartender said, “You’d better bring in the National Guard. The guy who started the fight is Colter Norris.”

John and his son said the same curse word at the same time.

“Otherwise, I would have already sprayed both of those”—static did not quite bleep out the curse—“with six-shot already.”

Colter Norris was foreman of Ashton Maddox’s ranch. He was old, ornery and tough as nails, and hard to provoke, but when he got riled or drunk, especially during winter when there wasn’t much for a cowboy to do but get just drunk enough to keep a job and hang on till spring, he could level a joint like the Busted Stirrup in half an hour.

“Hang tight, Bull,” Mary told him. More garble. Then “. . . on the way.”

Slowing the Interceptor, Drew grabbed the mic. “Mary,” he said urgently. “Get Denton. Send Denton.”

She did not respond.

“Mary,” he tried again. “I’m twenty minutes away.”

That was a lie. Drew felt hopeless. Twenty minutes. That was like twenty thousand miles. And twenty minutes wouldn’t get him to Neely Road, the local name for Montana Highway 60. If he could be at the Busted Stirrup in forty-five minutes, it would be a miracle.

When no response came, he radioed for Deputy Denton Creel, knowing that, this being Creel’s day off, he wouldn’t be near a sheriff’s radio. He pointed at the cell phone.

“Billy, call Denton now.”

Drew couldn’t dial and drive down this mountain road at the same time, and he had never been bright enough to figure out how to get the stupid cell phone to call with a verbal command.

Denton answered on the third ring. Billy had put the call on speakerphone.

“John. What is it?”

“Denton. Colter Norris is tearing up the Busted Stirrup. Derrick’s off on vacation. I need you to get there ASAP.”

“You’re breaking . . . John. Repeat.”

Drew swore, then repeated what he had said, only louder.

He held his breath.

“John . . .” More garbled nonsense followed. “. . . dropped off . . . Connie Good . . . hour away.”

The sigh sounded like a volcano erupting. Drew had caught just enough to understand Denton Creel’s response.

He had dropped off Connie Good Stabbing, a Blackfoot woman and alcoholic who got special treatment among county and tribal officials because, well, she had had a rough life—and she was the daughter of a Blackfoot legend, Drew’s good friend Hassun.

And the Blackfoot Indian Reservation bordered Cutthroat County on the north. Creel was about an hour from Basin Creek in the best conditions. He’d get there about the same time Drew could.

“Hang up,” Drew told his son. “And hold on.”

He pressed down the accelerator.

John Drew would blow his top.

That’s one thing Mary Broadbent knew for certain. He might be mad enough to fire her or—even worse—dump her. But her boss, her lover, was way up in the Always Winter peaks, and knowing how long it generally took Sheriff John T. Drew and Billy to get everything protected from the snow already falling, he wouldn’t be able to get to Basin Creek in an hour, and that’s if Johnny hadn’t been lying to her about being twenty minutes away.

Besides, twenty minutes would be too late for the Busted Stirrup—and Mary’s landlady owned that bar.

“What choice do I have?”

She was surprised to hear her own voice. It sounded like that time she had gone into that cave on a grade-school field trip to Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park near Whitehall, when Monty Jefferson had dared her to yell “Charley Parker is a big dummy!” in one of the limestone chambers. The echoes scared the dickens out of everyone, especially their elderly teacher.

Mary wasn’t cleared by her doctors yet to do much of anything. She still needed the walking cane, but at least she had graduated from wheelchairs and walkers. Buckling on the belt that carried the Glock Model 17 took longer than she anticipated, but her vision was clear and she didn’t feel dizzy or show signs of another tear-inducing headache. The bulletproof vest went on easily, and she stepped out into the hallway.

So far, so good.

Once she made it to the staircase, Mary felt better, but kept one hand on her cane and the other on the guardrail as she made her way down to the ground floor. It wasn’t like she was coming down the Empire State Building. County offices in the Cutthroat County Courthouse /Basin Creek Municipal Building were on the second story.

But she did run into the clerk, James Alder, who was entering the old building as Mary was walking toward the front door.

“Hey, Mary,” he said, greeting her warmly. Then he noticed the vest and belt. His smile faded. “Any trouble?”

“I’m just building up my strength,” she said. “Getting myself back into shape.” She tugged on the front of the belt and smiled. “Need to lose some weight.”

Building up my strength . . . ? Getting back into shape . . . ? Need to lose weight . . . ? What a bunch of horse hockey to say!

Maybe that bullet to her brain had shattered her ability to tell lies all so smoothly. Lose weight? She had lost twenty-two-point-four-six pounds in that Missoula hospital. And at five foot two, she needed all the weight and muscle she could stand.

Alder was staring after her as she went out the front door. She whispered a barnyard oath and moved down the wheelchair ramp, clutching the rail with her left hand.

She didn’t hear the door to the creaky old building open, though, and she wasn’t about to look back—just in case John Alder was staring after her.

Seeing her Ford, she decided not to take it. She wasn’t cleared to drive, either, but the Busted Stirrup wasn’t more than a couple of blocks away.

Mary made a beeline for the saloon.

It sucked being an invalid.

She had to catch her breath before she got to the street in front of the bar, and inhaling frigid air burned like whiskey going down the wrong way. Glass exploded, and the patrons who had escaped the melee inside and several passersby gasped and pointed at the barstool that crashed onto a dusting of snow.

Mary thought about quitting, but then she whispered “Semper fi” and crossed the icy street.

Bull Resnick had left the war zone and now screamed into his cell phone, calling Colter Norris every four-letter word in the book. He had to be talking to Cindy Kristiansen. That wasn’t good. The landlady would give Mary grief till the end of days, and she probably was loading an assault rifle at this very minute to come and protect her property and fill the Circle M foreman full of holes. But Cindy was eighty-two years old, so it might take her a while to make it from her apartment.

“Derrick not’s here!” the bartender yelled into his phone. “Denton Creel’s not here! And the sheriff is up in the Always Winters . . . !” He held the phone away from his ear to keep from going deaf, then brought the phone closer to his mouth and roared, “What could I do? You want me to shoot someone who rides for the Circle M? Not meaning any disrespect, but you don’t pay me enough to do that, Miss Cindy.”

He moved the phone away.

Mary crossed the street and pushed a gawking, gangly ninth-grader named Harry Evarts aside.

It could have been worse. This could have been going on on a Friday or Saturday night. But on a weekday afternoon, on a cold, wintry day, there were no more than ten spectators, and that included the Evarts kid. She didn’t spot Basin Creek’s newspaper editor among the faces.

“Let me through.” She tried to sound like Clint Eastwood or Robert De Niro, but figured she came more across as Shirley Temple or Doris Day.

“Hold on.” Bull Resnick lowered the phone. He stared uncomprehendingly . . . unbelievingly . . . then spoke hurriedly into the phone. “Miss Cindy, I gotta go. Deputy Broadbent just showed up.” He slipped the phone into a back pocket in his Wranglers and hurried toward Mary.

“Deputy . . . you can’t . . . I mean . . .”

Mary stared him down.

“Is anyone else inside other than Colter Norris?” She hoped her voice didn’t squeak. She hoped her eyes managed to tell this fellow about her age that she was up to the task at hand.

“He knocked out one of the seasonal Circle M hirelings. A Mexican. I can’t remember his name.”

Glass shattered inside.

Mary shook her head. “The county ought to fine Ashton Maddox.”

Someone in the crowd said, “Aw, Colter ain’t done nothin’ like this in a dog’s age.”

“He’s probably just ticked off like everyone else since COVID,” Henry Richey muttered. Richey was the county tax accessor. The Busted Stirrup’s value was going down quickly. Richey smiled at Mary. “I called . . .”

But a cowboy with a blackening eye interrupted him.

“Nah,” the cowboy said. “Colt’s just ringin’ in the new year.”

“Well,” Bull Resnick said, “if he ain’t under arrest before Miss Cindy gets here, he’s gonna be ringin’ in the new year in hell.”

Mary got the hint. “Stand back,” she said, though the onlookers had already moved to a mostly safe position on what passed for a sidewalk in Basin Creek. Owners of the pickups and SUVs parked in the lot had backed their vehicles up to protect them from thrown beer or whiskey bottles, or—she took in the barstool in the snow—anything that Colter Norris could get his hands on.

She started toward the door to the bar.

In her first year on the force—like two deputies and a sheriff made a force—she had seen John Drew take care of Colter Norris when the foreman was mad-drunk after losing a Super Bowl bet. John and Mary had gone through the door, which was off its hinges, quickly, and John had ordered Mary to keep him covered and not accidentally put a bullet in his back. He’d just walked straight up to the slim but tough-as-nails foreman, drew his pistol, screamed at Norris not to move an inch, then when he got up close to him, he’d swung the barrel of his gun and knocked the drunk out before he knew what had happened.

“Take command,” Drew told her later that night in his office after the doctor had ruled that Colter Norris probably wouldn’t even have a headache—from either all the booze he’d had at the Busted Stirrup or the walnut-sized knot and cut that required three stitches on his noggin—when he woke up the next afternoon.

“A guy like Colter, he doesn’t expect someone to just walk right up to him and put him down” was Johnny’s lesson. “Because he’s got his pride. And mostly because he’s drunk as a skunk.”

He had finished typing the report, printed it out, and passed the paper to Mary for proofreading.

“But you have to read the situation. And know who you’re going up against. I wouldn’t have. . .