Out of Range (2 page)

Joe turned back. “No, they don’t look happy.”

“They don’t like it that Bud made Missy cosignatory on all of this,” Marybeth said, waving her hand to indicate literally all they could see. “Bud Jr. got hammered at the dress rehearsal last night and shouted some things at his father before he passed out in the bushes. Sally was there last night for about a half an hour, before she disappeared with one of Bud’s ranch hands.”

“Welcome to the family,” Joe said to his wife.

The new Twelve Sleep County sheriff, Kyle McLanahan, stood in front of Joe and Marybeth in the food line. The piquant smell of barbecued pork and beef hung heavy in the light mountain air.

“Kyle,” Joe said, nodding.

“Joe. Marybeth. Congratulations are in order, I guess.”

“I guess,” Joe said.

“Same to you,” Marybeth said coolly. “I haven’t seen you since the election.”

McLanahan nodded, hitched up his pants. Looked toward the mountains. Squinted. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“Yup,” Joe said.

Kyle McLanahan had been the long time chief deputy for local legend O. R. “Bud” Barnum, who had been sheriff for twenty eight years. Barnum had owned the county in a sense, having a hand in just about every aspect of it. His downfall came over the past five years, as his reputation eroded, then rotted and tumbled in on itself. That Barnum’s decline coincided with Joe’s arrival in Saddlestring was no coincidence. The Outfitter Murders, mishandled by Barnum, had begun the slide. Barnum’s shadowy involvement with the Stockman’s Trust continued it. The ex sheriff ’s complicity with Melinda Strickland in her raid on the Sovereign compound started the local gossip that Barnum had lost his commitment to the community and was looking out only for himself. The sheriff ’s deception during the cattle mutilations had turned the weekly Saddlestring Roundup against him. Joe had been in the middle of everything, one way or another. Seeing the writing on the wall (and in the newspaper), Barnum withdrew from the running two weeks before the election. Instead, McLanahan had stepped into the race, as had Deputy Mike Reed. In Joe’s opinion, Reed was an honest cop and McLanahan was McLanahan— volatile, thick headed, a throwback to the Barnum style of politics and corruption. McLanahan won 80 percent of the vote.

“Have you been listening to your radio this morning?”

Sheriff McLanahan asked Joe. “I saw your truck in the parking lot.”

Joe shook his head. “I’m off duty.”

Because Marybeth and Lucy were in the wedding, they had left the Picketts’ small stateowned home early that morning in Marybeth’s van. Joe had brought Sheridan in his green Ford Game and Fish pickup after breakfast, but he hadn’t turned on his radio during the drive.

“Then you haven’t heard that they found a game warden dead over in Jackson,” McLanahan said.

Joe felt a shiver run through him. “What?”

Sheridan had quickly become bored with Lucy and her friends in the play area that had been put up far enough away from the reception that the children wouldn’t bother the adults. The placement had Missy’s stamp all over it, Sheridan thought. A swing set had been erected, as well as smallersized tables and chairs complete with plastic tea sets.

She wandered away from the play area and the reception into the makeshift parking lot. It was tough being thirteen. Too old to play, too young to be considered one of the adults. Her parents were fine, she thought, they never treated her with disrespect, although her mother was starting to bug her in ways she couldn’t yet say. In a situation like this, with adults all around, she was patronized. She climbed into her dad’s pickup truck and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. At least she finally had contact lenses and didn’t look so much like a geek, she thought.

Absently, she clicked on the radio. It was set to the channel reserved for game wardens and brand inspectors. She sometimes liked to listen to the interplay between the men and the dispatchers, usually women, at the headquarters in Cheyenne. There was a surprising amount of activity on the radio for a Saturday morning in early September.

“The Jackson game warden,” McLanahan said, following Joe and Marybeth to their table. “Found him dead this morning in his house.”

“Murdered?” Joe asked. He felt Marybeth tense up.

“Naw. Ate his own gun.”

Marybeth gasped.

“Fortyfour Magnum,” McLanahan said. “Not much left of his head, is what I hear.”

Joe was out of his chair and three inches from McLanahan’s face. He hissed, “That’ll be enough with the details right now in front of my wife.”

McLanahan feigned hurt and surprise. “Sorry, Joe. I thought you’d want to know.”

The new sheriff turned and left, heading for his table on the other side of the yard.

“Joe, was he talking about Will Jensen?” Marybeth asked.

“No,” Joe said, confused. “It couldn’t have been. He must have his information about halfright, as usual.”

Marybeth shook her head. “I remember when we met Will and Susan. Remember their kids? Sheridan and their son tore around their house while you and Will talked at their kitchen table.”

It made no sense to Joe. Jensen was a rock, a largerthanlife man who was considered one of the best there ever was within the department. Will Jensen was what game wardens wanted to be, the kind of man Joe aspired to be.

“I remember thinking,” Marybeth continued, looking up at Joe, “I remember thinking how much they were like us.” Joe sat back down, shaken. “Let’s hold off on this until we find out what the situation really is. Remember, all the information we’ve got at this point is from Deputy McLanahan.”

“Sheriff McLanahan,” Marybeth corrected gently.

Joe looked up, saw Sheridan running toward them from the cars, her blue dress flapping.

“All I know is that Will Jensen did not commit suicide,”

Joe said bluntly. “That’s not possible.”

“Joe . . .”

“Dad!” Sheridan gushed, stopping in front of them, breathing hard from her run. “Guess what I just heard on the radio?”

Three

The drive back to their home from the wedding took place in the soft light of predusk that deepened the greens of the meadows and blazed the muffinshaped haystacks with bronze, as if they were lit from within. The ranch country rolled toward the mountains like swells in the ocean, shadows darkening in the folds of the terrain. Joe had noticed the soft bite of approaching fall, and now he could see that a few cottonwoods in the river valley were beginning to turn.

Sheridan was silent and sleepy in the passenger seat. Marybeth followed Joe in her van, giving him plenty of distance on the dirt road so that the dust his pickup kicked up would settle back down.

“It’s pretty,” Sheridan said. “This should be my favorite time of year.”

“It’s the best time, I think.”

“Maybe someday I’ll agree with you,” she said. “But I’ve got the blues.”

Joe knew what Sheridan meant. His daughter had begun junior high the week before, which meant a new school, a new schedule, and many more students. Her load of homework had tripled from the year before. And she was trying out for the volleyball team. Because Lucy and Sheridan now had different school schedules, Marybeth spent much more time driving them from place to place, delivering them or picking them up after school or activities. Joe had been taking Sheridan to school, and she put on a brave face for him, but he knew she was nervous and emotional about the change.

Joe loved the fall, even though it meant that biggame hunting seasons would soon be under way and he’d be in the field checking licenses and hunters from before sunrise until well after dark for nearly two and a half months. It was his busiest time as a game warden, and often exhausting. But, as always, he would throw himself into it, establish his rhythm. And, as always, he would find himself a little disappointed when it was over and fall surrendered to winter. He loved working hard, being outside, feeling his senses tingle as he approached a hunting camp not knowing who or what to expect. For two months, nearly every single human he encountered would be armed. These were men who lived their lives solely for the reward in the fall of their oneweek or twoweek hunt. They wanted to drink hard, eat like soldiers after a yearlong march, hunt a pronghorn antelope, mule deer, elk, or moose, and burn out all of the primal energy and desire that they’d stored up during the previous year of humiliation and frustration. Sometimes, he encountered men in the field who didn’t want to meet a game warden that day. That’s when things got interesting.

Now, though, Joe was tired; he had eaten and drunk too much, even danced a few dances with Marybeth, Sheridan, and Lucy. Missy, flushed with wine, had dragged him from their table to the springy dance floor. As it turned out, it was her nexttolast dance before she joined Bud in his black Suburban and headed for the tiny Saddlestring airport. The newlyweds would take the seventeenpassenger commuter plane to Denver, then fly to Italy for their honeymoon. They would be gone for ten days. Bud would be back in time for the fall roundup when they moved their cattle from the mountain grass to the valley floor.

But as he drove, Joe could not stop thinking about Will Jensen, wondering what the circumstances could have been that made him kill himself. It didn’t make sense to him.

Will had been tough, level headed. Devoted to his family and his job. Or at least that’s what Joe had thought.

The Picketts lived in a small twostory house eight miles from Saddlestring on the Bighorn Road. The house was owned by the state, and had been their home for six years. It sat back from the road behind a recently painted white fence. There was a detached garage that housed Joe’s snowmobile and the family van, and a loafing shed and corral in back for their two horses. The Saddlestring District was considered a “twohorse” district, meaning that the department budgeted for at least two horses, tack, and feed. From the front yard, the southern face of Wolf Mountain dominated the view. Between the house and the mountain, the East Fork of the Twelve Sleep River serpentined through a willowchoked meadow toward the main river and town.

As Joe entered the house, he glanced through the open door of his tiny office near the mudroom and saw that the message light was blinking on his answering machine. At this time of the year, Joe got a lot of calls. Hunters, fishers, ranchers, outfitters, and citizens called any time of the day or night. Most assumed Joe worked out of an office in some kind of Game and Fish Department building. The reality was that his office was a tiny room in his own house. Marybeth and Sheridan served as unpaid receptionists and assistants, and even Lucy answered the phone or the door at times. In a state and community where men greeted each other on the street during the fall by asking, “Got your elk yet?” the game warden played a prominent role.

He sat down at his desk and loosened his tie, watching as Marybeth and Lucy passed by his open door. Both were carrying huge bouquets of flowers from the wedding that Missy had insisted they take with them. Joe’s office filled with the scent of flowers.

There were three messages. The first one was from Herman Klein, a rancher on the other side of Wolf Mountain.

Klein reported that the elk were already moving down out of the timber and eating his hay. Since he had requested more elk fence be constructed around his stacks the previous year, he was hoping that contract crews would be out soon, before winter. Joe cursed and made a note on his pad to call his fence contractor in the morning and follow up with Herman Klein. One of the few responsibilities that had become easier for Joe since he started was that he no longer had to construct elk fence himself, but could contract locally for it. Unfortunately, the local contractor was unreliable.

The second call was strange. Joe could hear a man’s labored breathing and faint, tinny music in the background, but no words were spoken. It went on like that until the time allotted for the message ran out. Joe looked at the telephone handset with puzzlement, then erased the message. It was the third such call in the past month. That was too many calls to assume a mistake or a misdial. But there was nothing he could do about it.

The last message was from Trey Crump, Joe’s supervisor in Cody.

“Joe, it’s Trey. I assume you’ve heard by now that Will Jensen took his own life over in Jackson.”

Joe sat up in his chair. Now it was absolutely confirmed.

“We still don’t know all of the details yet,” Trey continued, sounding weary and sad, “but the ME in Teton County ruled out any foul play. The method of death was obvious, I guess.”

There was a long pause. Then: “The Teton District isn’t a district we can allow to be vacant for even a few days. The elk season opens up at the end of next week, two weeks before yours does. There’s way too much action over there, and too much crap going on to leave it go.”

Joe’s heart jumped. The year before, he had put in a request to be considered for a new district. Twelve Sleep County seemed like a slowly closing vise. Too much had happened there. Although Joe still loved the Bighorns, and his district, he knew that in order to advance within the department he might have to move. If nothing else, he and Marybeth had discussed relocating to a place with more opportunities.

“The director called me this morning and asked me for a recommendation for a temporary game warden. I recommended you,” Trey said, laughing tiredly. “I thought he was going to shit right there. But I told him there are only two men I could recommend for an area as hot as Teton. One of them is you. The other, God bless him, was Will.”

Joe looked up. Marybeth leaned against the doorjamb, trying to read his expression.

Trey said, “I already talked to Phil Kiner in Laramie.

He’s got a trainee with him so he can break loose and come up to Twelve Sleep in a couple of weeks for the deer and elk openers. He trained up there when he first started out, so he knows the country in a general way. He’s not you, but he’ll get along okay. But I’d like to ask you to get over to Jackson as soon as you can. Can you do it? Call me as soon as possible, let me know.”