by C. J. Box
“That’s right. Call the FBI in Cheyenne and request assistance immediately. Tell them you might have a firefight up here and you need a federal strike team.”
McLanahan turned away and stomped his foot in the slush.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Joe said.
After a few smoldering moments, the sheriff said, “If this doesn’t all work out, I’m holding you personally responsible. You better understand that. I’ll hold a press conference and name names, and the governor and your director will hear from me.”
Joe shrugged. “If it does work out, you might have a chance of being sheriff again, as miserable as that will be for everybody.”
As McLanahan fumed, Joe walked back toward his pickup. “Keep your cell phone on and stay close to the radio,” Joe said over his shoulder. “I’ll call you as soon as I know if you need to send your goons in.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” McLanahan growled.
Joe said, “I just did.”
JOE CLICKED his radio over to the county frequency while he drove through town toward the mountains. He wanted to monitor traffic as well as he could, and hoped the arrest of Brueggemann would go down as smoothly and safely as possible. And that he wouldn’t hear a word about it until the arrest was made.
Then he called Mike Reed on his cell phone and woke Reed up.
“You’re supposed to be on a plane,” Reed said sleepily.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Joe said. “But in the meanwhile, I need to let you know what’s going on and apologize to you in advance.”
“Apologize for what?” Reed asked.
Joe sighed and told him the story. There was silence on the other end.
Finally, Reed said, “Don’t apologize, Joe. If we get the bad guys, it’s all worth it, whether I win or not. McLanahan’s still a fool, no matter what happens.”
“Thanks, Mike.”
“Well,” he said, “it sounds like I better get dressed and drag my butt into the office.”
HE SAW a few elk hunters road-hunting on his way up Bighorn Road. When they saw his green truck, they pulled over to be checked, but he waved and kept going.
His plan was under way, but he didn’t trust McLanahan not to figure out a way to screw it up.
He looked at his watch and guessed Marybeth and the girls would be able to see the tentlike architecture of Denver International out the window of their Beechcraft.
And he wondered where Nate Romanowski was, and hoped his friend would call. Immediately.
For the second time since he’d left the airport, he drove past his house. Unlike the last time, though, Joe noted a set of tire tracks that veered off the road in the snow near the mailbox, and large boot prints going to and from his box.
Since it was much too early for mail, Joe stopped, left his pickup running, and got out. The boot prints looked familiar, and a rush of excitement shot through him.
Joe opened the door of the mailbox and saw the glint of bronze inside. He reached in and grasped the thick, heavy cartridge between his fingers, and read the stamp on the back: .500 wyoming express fa. The FA stood for Freedom Arms, where the revolver and the cartridge were manufactured.
He slid the cartridge in the front pocket of his Wranglers as he strode back to his pickup.
This is it, he thought.
31
JOE DROVE through Crazy Woman Campground, where he’d first encountered Luke Brueggemann. There were a few hard-side camper trailers in tucked-away campsites. As he passed one, several hunters were lashing camo packs onto the backs of ATVs with bungee cords. The hunters looked up, saw the green pickup with the game warden inside, and stopped what they were doing. One large man with a full beard and a coffee mug in his paw instinctively reached for his wallet to pull out his elk license and ID. Joe tipped the brim of his hat to them as he drove slowly by.
Catch you next time, he thought.
The morning sun had yet to soften or melt the snowfall from the night before in the deep timber. There were three to four inches of it covering the two-track that exited out the back of the campground. At least one ATV was ahead of him, marked by wide tracks and knobby impressions in the snow.
The road got rougher less than a half mile from the campground as it rose up into the trees. Joe reached down below the dashboard and clicked the toggle switch to four-wheel-high. The old road was overgrown and little used since the Forest Service had placed a moratorium on cattle grazing on federal leases high in the mountains, and it no longer appeared on topo maps of the area. But local hunters and poachers knew of it, as did Joe, because it was a back route along the side of the mountain that eventually emptied onto a plateau overlooking the South Fork of the Twelve Sleep River. Below the plateau was the location of the eleven outfitter camps. They were strung out along the river, each three to four miles from the next. The camps were accessed by the South Fork Trail, which loosely followed the bends and contours of the serpentine river.
The logging road Joe was on paralleled the South Fork Trail but on the other side of the mountain, and the two roads never crossed the water and intersected.
Joe thought of the conversation he’d had with Luke Brueggemann that first day when he showed the trainee the locations for the camps. Ten were occupied by familiar local outfitter names, he told Brueggemann. One was unfamiliar.
Because the permits for the camps were issued through the local office of the U.S. Forest Service and not Joe’s agency, there was no way for Joe to look up the names of the permittees. Although the USFS was supposed to forward the list of outfitters every year, a combination of bureaucracy, other priorities, and general malaise that formed between state and federal agencies usually delayed the arrival of the list until well after hunting season, when it did Joe no good. But he wished he could see the list now. Especially the new permittee who had obtained Camp Five.
Joe realized he’d misread Brueggemann’s reticent reaction to inspecting the camps that morning, assuming it had to do with riding horses up to them. But now Joe understood, or thought he did. Because it had to do with who had set up in Camp Five. Brueggemann, Joe guessed, was wary because he was taken by surprise by the plan and wanted to alert the occupant, but it would be difficult to do on horseback with Joe there, not to mention they’d be in and out of cell phone coverage. How relieved Brueggemann had been that morning when the ride got called off, Joe recalled. Now it made sense, and it had nothing to do with his horses.
THE TREES closed in on the old road the higher Joe climbed his pickup. Boughs heavy with snow dumped their loads on the cab of his pickup as he brushed under them. He picked his way slowly and cautiously up the road to avoid getting stuck or hitting a fallen tree obscured by the snow, but also to keep the engine whine of his pickup as low as possible.
He had no radio or cell phone reception so deep in the timber, and he checked both periodically. On top, he knew, he would break through the thick trees and emerge above the timberline, where he might catch a signal before plunging back down the other side.
He took a slow blind corner to the left through the trees and was surprised to see four massive bull elk barreling straight toward him down the road, their antlers catching glints of morning sun, their nostrils firing spouts of condensation, their eyes white and wild. He stomped on his brake pedal as one of the bulls nearly crashed into his grille but spun to the right at the last second and crashed headlong through the brush and timber on the side of the old road. The three others—a magnificent six-by-six, a five-by-five, and a young spike—all followed. Even with his windows closed to prevent snow from coming inside the cab, Joe could hear the sharp cracking of branches as the bulls barreled down the mountainside, kicking up pine needles and clumps of dark mulch in their wake.
Just as suddenly as the appearance of the elk, a red ATV—the vehicle that had gone up the road before him—and two hunters roared around a blind corner ahead in pursuit of the elk. The driver was bent over the handlebars and the passenger behind him had his rifle out
and pointed forward as if his plan had been to shoot from the moving vehicle. When the driver looked up and saw the green pickup, his mouth dropped open, but he stopped quickly and started a long skid in the mud and snow that came to a halt a few feet from Joe’s front bumper.
For a moment, Joe glared through his windshield at the driver and the shooter. The driver, a thick and wide dark-haired man with a weeklong hunting beard, flushed red with anger and trepidation. The shooter, who looked to be a younger and hairier version of the driver, was simply peeved.
Because the trees on each side of the road were so thick and close, neither vehicle could proceed without the other getting out of the way.
Joe sighed and opened his door and climbed out. He clamped his Stetson tight on his head and indicated for the driver to kill his motor, which burbled loudly like a Harley-Davidson wannabe.
The driver reached down and turned the key, and suddenly the forest was still, except for the distant sound of branches snapping and breaking as the elk thundered farther and farther away down the hillside.
He could hear the shooter growl a colorful stream of curses.
“How’s it going, guys?” Joe asked.
“Just great,” the driver sighed, “until you showed up. We’ve been up here busting our ass looking for elk for seven days without seeing a goddamn one, and then last night it snows and we ride right into them.”
“Yup, I saw ’em,” Joe said, indicating the churned-up path in the snow where the elk bolted into the timber.
“Then you showed up and fucked it up,” the shooter said, sitting back and propping the rifle on his thigh, the barrel in the air.
Joe nodded. He’d found over the years that his silence often produced confessions and was more effective than talking.
After a few beats of Joe simply looking at them, the driver said, “I guess we were acting kind of stupid chasing them like that.”
Joe nodded.
“And I guess my son here shouldn’t be trying to pop them from the back of a four-wheeler.”
“Nope.”
“And I think we’re still in our hunting area,” the driver said, raising his palms in an exaggerated way. “At least I hope so. It’s harder than hell to tell sometimes. I mean, it ain’t like you guys mark where one area ends and the other one starts.”
The shooter got quiet when he finally realized they might be in trouble.
Joe said, “Chasing wildlife is a violation; so is hunting them from a moving vehicle. And if you think you’re still in Area Thirty-four, well, you left it about a mile back.”
The driver took a deep breath as if to challenge Joe, then thought better of it and said, “Well, we’re damned sorry if we fucked up.” He thought better of his language and said, “I mean, screwed up.”
Joe said, “Yup.”
The father sighed. “You gonna write us up?”
Joe didn’t answer directly. He asked, “How far did you two go up the road this morning?”
The father looked worried, as if he was trying to figure out if they’d committed additional violations that morning. Finally, he said, “Just a couple miles. That’s where we jumped the elk. They took off running down this road and we followed their tracks.”
Joe nodded. “You didn’t go up far enough to get to the top? To see over into the river valley on the other side of the mountain? Where the outfitter camps are located?”
“Not today,” the shooter said quickly.
Joe thought he said it in a way that implied there was more to the story. “But you’ve been up that far this week?”
The father and son exchanged glances.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Joe asked amiably.
After a beat, the father turned back around and said, “Up until yesterday, we was hunting with my brother-in-law Richie. He said he had to go back last night to do some stuff at home. Richie is kind of a pain in the ass, but he knows this country up here like nobody else.”
“Anyway …” Joe prompted.
“Richie likes to hunt alone,” the father said. “He knows of some old miner cabin up there, and he likes to go up there by it and sit and glass the meadows with binoculars to see elk. He sits for hours up there, just looking around. He usually gets a nice bull that way. But something happened the last time he went up there. When he came back down, he looked fucking spooked. We asked him what happened or what he saw, but he just made up some bullshit about having to get home. He just packed up his gear and left us up here. We never could get him to tell us what happened.”
Joe felt a twinge in his scalp. “When was this?” he asked.
“Yesterday afternoon,” the father said. “He left last night before it started to snow. I’d normally say he’ll be back up soon because of this snow, but the way he left, I kind of wonder. It was just weird. Richie’s an elk-hunting fool, and I’ve never seen him just want to up and leave like that.”
Joe withdrew the notebook from his breast pocket and asked the father for Richie’s full name, address, and contact numbers. Neither the father nor the son knew much more than Richie’s last name and the part of Powell, Wyoming, he lived in, but the driver said his wife had those details. Joe closed the notebook. He knew that, if necessary, it was enough information to find Richie in a state with as few people in it as Wyoming.
“You gonna call him?” the son asked Joe.
“Maybe.”
“Tell him he still owes me for that case and a half of Coors he drank up here.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Joe said, sliding the notebook back into his uniform shirt.
He left the father and son wondering what was going to happen next and went back to his pickup. No cell signal. No radio reception. Joe dug a card out of the holder in his glove box and walked back to the hunters and handed it to the father.
He said, “If you’ll promise me something, you can consider this your lucky day, because I don’t have time to write you up right now and you’re both in clear violation. Tonight, if you haven’t seen me come back down the mountain, call nine-one-one. Tell the dispatcher we met and which road we’re on. Let her take it from there.”
The father asked, “That’s it? Just that we met you?”
“Yup.”
Joe said, “Get your vehicle out of the road and take it back into your designated hunting area and make that call tonight, and for now I’ll look the other way.”
After thanking him profusely and reversing the ATV into the brush so Joe could get by, the driver looked at the card and said, “So you’re Joe Pickett?”
Joe nodded.
“I’ve always heard you wouldn’t give a guy a break.”
“Like I said, it’s your lucky day.”
_______
AS HE LEFT THEM, he glanced into his rearview mirror to see them talking excitedly to each other and gesturing toward where the elk had run. He had an inkling that once he was gone they’d ignore him and go after the elk and probably get stuck somewhere in pursuit.
He shook his head, vowed to look out for them and give them a ticket if he ran into them again, and ground up the road until they were out of view.
He hated not doing his job properly, even given the circumstances. But if they made the call to dispatch as they’d agreed, at least someone would know where he was last seen.
And he thought about something Nate had said.
Recruit local tribesmen.
ALTHOUGH he’d been to the top of this road only once many years ago, he thought he remembered where he could find the old miner’s cabin. What he didn’t know was what was up there that might spook a dedicated elk hunter off the mountain hours before the tracking snow had arrived.
32
“GOD, THE MOUNTAINS are beautiful,” Haley said as Nate drove the white Tahoe toward the Bighorns, which were lit up with a full blast of morning sun that contrasted the fresh snow on the meadows and peaks against miles of dark timber. She said it as she reloaded the magazine, one by one, with 6.8-millimeter car
tridges for the Mini-14.
Nate grunted. He noted that now that the mask was off, she showed a confident proficiency with weapons that she’d kept under wraps before.
“So this is where you live?” she asked, meaning the general area.
“Most of the time,” Nate said. “When I’m not living in a cave.”
“Do you realize how pathetic that just sounded?” she asked with a shy smile.
“Yes.”
“Maybe after this you won’t have to run anymore.”
Nate let that hang for a moment, then turned toward her. “There’s a difference between running and dropping out.”
“Sorry.”
_______
HE WASN’T SURE how he wanted to play it, but the more he thought it through and ran different scenarios through his mind, he kept coming back to his original inclination. It had worked with the two operatives on the mountain in Colorado, on the highway outside of Jackson, and countless times over the years on special operations.
Nate said, “We’re going to go right at him.”
“Pardon?” she said.
“There are lots of ways to do this,” he said. “We could find a position and observe him—make sure he’s there and try to figure out how many guys he has with him, then make a plan. Strike at night, flank him, that sort of thing.”
She nodded.
“For all we know, though,” he said, “Nemecek has set up his usual electronic perimeter. He’s likely got sensors, cameras, and motion detectors at all the key points around his camp. He’ll know if someone is moving in on him, and he’s a master at dealing with those kinds of situations. Hell, he taught me. And in the worst-case scenario, he just drives away and we never get a crack at him. In that case, this could go on forever.”
Haley shook her head. “I can’t imagine trying to live a normal life and knowing he’s out there,” she said.
“Welcome to my world,” Nate said.
“So how are you going to confront him?” she asked. “We don’t know how many we’re up against or who they are.”