Free Off the Grid by C. J. Box

overtime for that when I’m off the clock?”
    “It’s implied,” White said.
    “Implied,”
Frink repeated under his breath, as if it were the most outlandish thing he had ever heard. “Look, we didn’t cause this tohappen. We’re not liable for any of this. We didn’t know GB-53 would go after Bub. How could we?”
    Joe wanted to smack him.
    “We can talk about this later, T-Frink,” White said.
    “Okay,” Frink said after a deep sigh. He looked over at Joe and gestured to the monitor. “Here’s where things went bad.”
    The lines merged sometime between three-ten and three-thirty. The tracking devices continued to send out signals every twenty minutes, but they didn’t move.
    “How far is that from here?” Joe asked.
    “Three miles,” White said.
    Joe leaned out of the van and scanned the terrain to the west where Bub had stopped moving. Across the open meadow was a wall of trees that continued as far as he could see.
    “There’s no way to drive there,” Joe said. “But if we take my horse, we can get there in less than an hour, if we go now.”
    Frink quickly sat back in his chair with his hands up in a
Not me
gesture.
    “I don’t want you along anyway,” Joe said. To Jessica White and Marcia Mead, he said, “One of you should stay here to direct the sheriff. The other one can come with Rojo and me.”
    “I’ll go,” White said, instinctively reaching back for the can of bear spray on her belt to make sure it was there.
    “Bet you wish you had that gun now,” Joe said, grim.
    “We’re here to save bears, not to kill them,” White said.
    “Best not let Bub’s family hear you say that.”

7
    “GB-53 is on the move,” Jessica White reported to Joe, even though he’d just clearly heard Marcia Mead say exactly that on the handheld radio White had looped around her neck.
    “Which way?” Joe asked, which White repeated.
    “South,” Mead said.
    “South,” White said, looking up.
    “Away from us,” Joe said. “That makes me feel a little more secure.”
    “Me too,” White said.
    They were on foot in the black timber. Joe was leading Rojo with a loose rope as they shinnied through closely spaced trees and stepped over downed logs. He’d thought about trying to ride double with Jessica White, but because Rojo was worn out from the day and the close timber was all around them, he’d decided against it. Too many low-hanging branches to navigate with two riders. The reason for walking Rojo in was in case Joe had to transport a body out.
    Much to Daisy’s dismay, Joe had closed her in the cab of his truck with the windows cracked. He didn’t want to risk losing his Labrador.
    •   •   •
    I T WAS NOT YET DUSK above the crown of the trees, but inside the forest it was already twilight and muted. The only sounds were from unseen squirrels, announcing their encroachment up the line to other squirrels, and the heavy footfalls of Rojo in the pine needle mulch.
    Jessica White had a battery-powered GPS tracking device hanging from around her neck, as well as the radio. She’d said she preferred to be in contact with Marcia Mead and Tyler Frink back in the van rather than use the unit. Their electronics had better capability than the portable unit, she’d told Joe.
    He thought it an odd decision at first until he realized that she was scared and she needed to maintain constant contact with her colleagues. She was used to doing research by staring at computer monitors and analyzing what she saw, not taking off across mountains as the sun slipped behind the western peaks. Otherwise, he thought, what they were doing and what they might encounter would seem too
real
.
    •   •   •
    B EFORE THEY ’ D LE FT , she’d asked T-Frink to increase the rapidity of the transmission rate on GB-53’s collar to fifteen-second pulses. She’d said, “Too much can happen if we can only track him in twenty-minute increments.” At the time, Joe saw the sense in that,even though he