Joe clamped his hat tight on his head with his right hand and silently asked God to save April, because she’d suffered enough in her short life, and to give Marybeth the strength to carry on.
—
“HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW the Cates family?” Reed asked Joe as he drove them to the Twelve Sleep County Building. Joe was in the passenger seat of the specially equipped van. Deputy Boner had volunteered to follow them in Joe’s pickup and to keep an eye on Daisy until Joe could retrieve his vehicle and his dog.
“I’ve tangled with them before,” Joe said. “Mainly with Bull, the oldest son. I’ve met the old man, Eldon, and I’ve been to his elk camp a few times.”
He knew the Cateses lived on twelve acres in the breaklands. The property contained a smattering of old structures in the scrub pine, including the shambled main house, a barn, and several falling-down outbuildings. Their place was about twenty minutes from town.
“What do you know about them?” Reed asked.
Joe told Reed that the Cates family ran a hunting-guide business called Dull Knife Outfitters. Dull Knife was one of the oldest big-game outfitters in the Bighorns, and one of the most notorious. There were rumors that Eldon was involved in taking elk out of season as well as in the wrong hunt areas, on behalf of clients, and that he made deals with hunters to obtain prime licenses on their behalf without going through the lottery, if they paid his special fee. Joe had even heard that Eldon had a secret elk camp deep in the mountains that he operated completely above the law, where he guaranteed certain wealthy hunters a kill that would make the record books.
But they were rumors only. Joe had never caught Eldon committing a crime, and no accuser had ever come forward. He’d interviewed several Dull Knife clients over the years and none of them would implicate Eldon. Despite spending years on horseback in the most remote areas of the mountains, he’d not yet found Eldon’s secret camp—if it existed at all.
Eldon had a unique reputation among the other, more respectable outfitters in the district. Although sniping among competing hunting guides was normal, the one thing Eldon’s competitors could agree on was that they didn’t like Eldon. They thought he used his reputation as the oldest outfitter in the mountains as a slam against them, and they didn’t like how he challenged the ethics of the profession—which reflected poorly on them. Guides said that Eldon sometimes claimed kills made by their clients by tagging them on behalf of his clients, and that he refused to respect the boundaries of the Wyoming Outfitters Board’s designated hunting areas. He would also bad-mouth other outfitters to his clients, calling them “amateurs,” “greenhorns,” and worse. For a number of years, Eldon drove his four-wheel-drive pickup around town with a magnetic sign on the door that read DULL KNIFE OUTFITTERS: SATISFYING OUR CUSTOMERS WHEN THE OTHER GUIDES WERE STILL IN DIAPERS.
Joe had been asked by several outfitters to talk to Eldon about it, but Joe told them there was nothing he could legally do. When the magnetic sign was stolen from the truck while Eldon was in a bar, Eldon had vowed to press charges for theft against the other outfitters in the county, but he never did.
Joe had always considered Eldon Cates to be an aggravating throwback who would someday foul up. When he did, Joe wanted to be there.
Bull was another story. Bull was bigger and dumber than his dad, and two years earlier, Joe had caught the son and his unpleasant wife, Cora Lee, red-handed with a trophy bull elk in the back of their pickup three days before the season opener.
Bull’s hunting rig could be identified instantly because it had been retrofitted as a kind of rolling meat wagon. He’d welded a steel pole and crossbeam into the bed and strung a steel cable and hook from a turnbuckle. With the device, Bull could back up to a big-game carcass, hook the cable through its back legs, and hoist it up in order to field dress and skin it on the spot.
Bull’s scheme had been to kill the bull prior to the arrival of two hunters from Pennsylvania. If either of the two hunters didn’t get their own trophy bull elk, Bull was going to tag the carcass with their license and let them take it home, thus guaranteeing a one hundred percent successful hunt. The Pennsylvania clients hadn’t been in on the scheme, from what Joe could determine.
Judge Hewitt was a hunter himself, and he came down hard on Bull Cates.
The violations had cost the outfitter several thousand dollars in fines, the forfeiture of his rifles and pickup, and the loss of his outfitter’s license from the state association. Bull was bitter and claimed Joe had “deprived him of his livelihood” and that he would someday even the score. Cora Lee acted out during the sentencing and hurled epithets at Joe and Judge Hewitt and was forcibly removed from the courtroom by deputies.
It wasn’t uncommon for a game violator to talk big in bars about getting even with the local game warden, and Bull wasn’t the first to ever make threats. For Joe, it was part of the job. He knew that in the past the threats had always dissipated with the onslaught of the next morning’s hangover.
Nevertheless, for months after, Joe had taken measures to avoid running into Bull and Cora Lee. There was no reason to pour fuel on the embers. Joe wasn’t as young as he used to be, and Bull had six inches and fifty pounds on him.
So when Joe would see Bull’s pickup—a 2007 Ford F-250 with a DULL KNIFE OUTFITTERS decal crudely scraped off the driver’s-side door—in the parking lot of the grocery store, he would drive around the block until it was gone. When the vehicle was parked in front of the Stockman’s Bar, Joe would keep driving.
When there were no hunting seasons open, the Cateses operated C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service. C&C stood for “Cates & Cates.” It was a dirty job, pumping out rural septic tanks. The Cateses owned several circa-1980 pump trucks, and Joe often saw them on remote roads in the spring and fall. When he spotted one in front of him on the highway, he gave it a wide berth.
“So you know Bull, all right,” Reed said with a chuckle. “Did you ever run across Timber, the second son?”
“Timber?” Joe said. “What’s with these names?”
“If you think Bull is a problem, he’s a piece of cake compared to son number two. Timber was a hell of a high school athlete. He was quarterback in the late eighties, the last time the Saddlestring Wranglers won state, back before you came into this country. Timber walked on at UW, and he might have played eventually, but he got into some kind of bar fight at the Buckhorn in Laramie and they threw him off the team. Unfortunately, he moved back home. And he was crazy. He’d get so violent when he drank, it would take four of us deputies to get him down. When he discovered meth, he got even worse. Finally, he was arrested up in Park County for carjacking some old lady on her way to Yellowstone Park because he’d run out of gas and he wanted her Mustang. Lucky for all of us, Timber is doing three years in Rawlins. I hear he isn’t exactly a model prisoner, or he would have been out and back here by now.”
Reed took a deep breath. “However . . . I got word from a buddy of mine, a prison guard, that Timber could be released any day now. I’ve sent a memo to my guys to keep an eye out for him. My guess is he’ll go straight home to Mama. Then it’ll be a matter of time before he gets in trouble again.”
“Then there’s Dallas,” Joe said.
“Then there’s Dallas,” Reed echoed.
Joe had met him four months ago at his house. Dallas had been invited there by April, who at the time had worked at Welton’s Western Wear. Dallas was a local hero, winner of the National High School Finals Rodeo, then the College National Finals Rodeo, and at that time he was in second place in the standings in bull riding and bound for the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. His lean, hard face was so well-known among rodeo fans that his likeness was used to sell jeans in western stores, and he’d visit local retailers to promote the brand when he wasn’t riding bulls. That’s how Dallas and April met.