“Wow,” she said.
“‘Wow’ is right,” Joe agreed.
“Antelope bore me,” Julie said. “There are so many of them.”
For a moment he had been concerned that the lead antelope was going to barrel into the passenger door, something that occasionally happened when a pronghorn wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. That was all he needed, Joe thought sourly, another damaged pickup Pope could carp about.
That’s when the call came over the mutual-aid channel.
Joe said, “Would you two please be quiet for a minute?”
While the entire county was sheriff’s department jurisdiction, game wardens and highway patrolmen were called on for backup for rural emergencies.
Sheridan hushed. Julie did too, but with attitude, crossing her arms in front of her chest and clamping her mouth tight. Joe turned up the volume on the radio. Wendy, the dispatcher, had not turned off her microphone. In the background, there was an anxious voice.
“Excuse me, where are you calling from?” Wendy asked the caller.
“I’m on a cell phone. I’m sitting in my car on the side of the highway. You won’t believe it.”
“Can you describe the situation, sir?”
The cell-phone signal ebbed with static, but Joe could clearly hear the caller say, “There are three men in cowboy hats swinging at each other with shovels in the middle of the prairie. I can see them hitting each other out there. It’s a bloody mess.”
Wendy said, “Can you give me your location, sir?”
The caller read off a mile marker on State Highway 130. Joe frowned. The Bighorn Road they had just driven on was also Highway 130. The mile marker was just two miles from where they had turned onto the ranch.
“That would be Thunderhead Ranch then, sir?” Wendy asked the caller.
“I guess.”
Joe shot a look toward Julie. She had heard and her face was frozen, her eyes wide.
“That’s just over the hill,” she said.
Joe had a decision to make. He could drive the remaining five miles to the ranch headquarters, where Julie lived, or take a fork in the road that would deliver him, as well as Sheridan and Julie, to the likely location of an assault in progress.
“I’m taking you home,” Joe said, accelerating.
“No!” Julie cried. “What if it’s someone I know? We’ve got to stop them.”
Joe slowed, his mind racing. He felt it necessary to respond, but did not want to put the girls in danger. “You sure?”
“Yes! What if it’s my dad? Or one of my uncles?”
He nodded, did a three-point turn, and took the fork. He snatched the mic from its cradle. “This is GF forty-three. I’m about five to ten minutes from the scene.”
Wendy said, “You’re literally there on the ranch?”
“Affirmative.”
There was a beat of silence. “I don’t know whether Sheriff McLanahan is going to like that.”
Joe and the sheriff did not get along.
Joe snorted. “Ask him if he wants me to stand down.”
“You ask him,” Wendy said, completely breaking protocol.
AS THEY POWERED up the two-track, Joe could see that Sheridan and Julie had huddled together.
“Can you keep a secret?” Julie whispered, loud enough for Joe to hear.
“Of course I can,” Sheridan said. “You know that. We’re best friends.”
Julie nodded seriously, as if making up her mind.
“You can’t tell your parents,” Julie said, nodding at Joe.
Sheridan hesitated before answering. “I swear.”
“Swear to God?” Julie asked.
“Come on, Julie. I said I promise.”
“Tighten your seat belts, girls,” Joe cautioned. “This is going to be bumpy.”
The scene before them, as they topped the hill, silenced Julie and whatever she was going to tell Sheridan. Below them, on the flat, there were three pickups, each parked haphazardly in the sagebrush, doors wide open. Inside the ring of trucks, three men circled each other warily, raising puffs of dust, an occasional wide swing with a shovel flashing the late afternoon sun.
Out on the highway, two sheriff’s department SUVs and a highway patrolman turned from the highway onto an access road, their lights flashing. One of the SUVs burped on his siren.
“Jesus Christ,” McLanahan said over the radio, as the vehicles converged on the fight. “It’s a rodeo out here. There’s blood pourin’ outta ’em . . .”
“Yee-haw,” the highway patrolman said sardonically.
Joe thought the scene in front of him was epic in implication, and ridiculous at the same time. Three adults, two of them practically legends in their own right, so blinded by their fight that they didn’t seem to know that a short string of law-enforcement vehicles was approaching.
And not just any adults, but Arlen, Hank, and Wyatt Scarlett, the scions of the most prominent ranch family in the Twelve Sleep Valley. It was as if the figures on Mount Rushmore were head-butting one another.
It was darkly fascinating seeing the three of them out there, Joe thought. He was reminded that, in a situation like this, he would always be an outsider looking in. Despite his time in Twelve Sleep County, he would never feel quite a part of this scenario, which was rooted so deeply in the valley. The tendrils of the Scarlett family ranch and of the Scarletts themselves reached too deeply, intertwined with too many other people and families, to ever completely sort out. Their interaction with the people and history of the area was multilayered, nuanced, too complicated to ever fully understand. The Scarletts were colorful, ruthless, independent, and eccentric. If newcomers to the area displayed even half of the strange behavior of the Scarletts, Joe was sure they’d have been run out of the state—or shunned to the point of cruelty. But the Scarletts were local, they were founders, they were benefactors and philanthropists—despite their eccentricities. It was almost as if longtime residents of the area had declared, in unison, “Yes, they’re crazy. But they’re our lunatics, and we won’t have anyone insulting them or judging them harshly who hasn’t lived here long enough to understand.”
Arlen was the oldest brother, and the best liked. He was tall with broad shoulders and a mane of silver-white wavy hair that made him look like the state senate majority floor leader he was. He had a heavy, thrusting jaw and the bulbous, spiderwebbed nose of a drinker. His clear blue eyes looked out from under bushy eyebrows that were black as smears of grease, and he had a soothing, sonorous voice that turned the reading of a diner menu into a performance. Arlen had the gift of remembering names and offspring, and could instantly continue a conversation with a constituent that had been cut off months before.
Hank, the middle brother, was smaller than Arlen. He was thin and wiry with a sharp-featured bladelike face, and wore a sweat-stained gray Stetson clamped tight on his head. Joe had never seen Hank without the hat, and had no idea if he had hair underneath it. He remembered Vern Dunnegan, the former game warden in the district, warning Joe to stay away from Hank unless he absolutely had the goods on him. “Hank Scarlett is the toughest man I’ve ever met,” Vern had said, “the scariest too.”
Hank had a way of looking coiled up when he stood still, the way a Brahma bull was calm just before the chute gate opened. Hank was an extremely successful big-game guide and outfitter, with operations in Wyoming, Alaska, and Kenya. His clients were millionaires, and he was suspected of using less-than-ethical means to assure kills of trophy animals. Hank had been on Joe’s radar screen even before Joe was assigned the Saddlestring District, and Hank knew it. All the game wardens knew of Hank. But Joe had never found hard evidence of any wrongdoing. Hank’s legend was burnished by rumors and stories, such as when Hank single-handedly packed a two-hundred-pound mountain sheep twelve miles across the Wind River Mountains in a blinding snowstorm. Or Hank crash-landing a bush plane with mechanical problems into the middle of a frozen Alaskan lake, rescuing two clients, amputating the leg of one of them while they waited for rescue. And Hank dropping from a tree onto the back of a record bull moose and riding it a quarter of a mile before reaching forward and slitting its throat.