So instead of looking at Bud Jr., Joe surveyed the expanse of ranchland laid out below the hill. Since he’d been fired from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department four months before and lost their state-owned home and headquarters, Joe Pickett was now the foreman of his father-in-law’s ranch—fifteen thousand acres of high grassy desert, wooded Bighorn Mountain foothills, and Twelve Sleep River valley. Although housing and meals were part of his compensation—his family lived in a 110-year-old log home near the ranch house—he would clear no more than $20,000 for the year, which made his old state salary look good in retrospect. His mother-in-law, Missy Vankueren-Longbrake, came with the deal.
It was the first October in sixteen years Joe was not in the field during hunting season, on horseback or in his green Game and Fish pickup, among the hunting camps and hunters within the 1,500-square-mile district he had patrolled. Joe was two weeks away from his fortieth birthday. His oldest daughter, Sheridan, was in her first year of high school and talking about college. His wife’s business management firm was thriving, and she outearned him four to one. He had traded his weapons for fencing tools, his red uniform shirt for a Carhartt barn coat, his badge for a shovel, his pickup for a ’99 Ford flatbed with LONGBRAKE RANCH painted on the door, his hard-earned authority and reputation for three weeks of overseeing a twenty-seven-year-old meth dealer who wanted to be known as Shamazz.
All because of a man named Randy Pope, the director of the Game and Fish Department, who had schemed for a year looking for a reason to fire him. Which Joe had provided.
When asked by Marybeth two nights ago how he felt, Joe had said he was perfectly happy.
“Which means,” she responded, “that you’re perfectly miserable.”
Joe refused to concede that, wishing she didn’t know him better than he knew himself.
But no one could ever say he didn’t work hard.
“Unhook that stretcher and move it down a strand,” Joe told Bud Jr.
Bud Jr. winced but did it. “My back . . .” he said.
The wire tightened up as Bud cranked on the stretcher, and Joe stapled it tight.
THEY WERE EATING their lunches out of paper sacks beneath a stand of yellow-leaved aspen when they saw the SUV coming. Joe’s Ford ranch pickup was parked to the side of the aspens with the doors open so they could hear the radio. Paul Harvey news, the only program they could get clearly so far from town. Bud hated Paul Harvey nearly as much as silence, and had spent days vainly fiddling with the radio to get another station and cursing the fact that static-filled Rush Limbaugh was the only other choice.
“Who is that?” Bud Jr. asked, gesturing with his chin toward the SUV.
Joe didn’t recognize the vehicle—it was at least two miles away—and he chewed his sandwich as the SUV crawled up the two-track that coursed through the gray-green patina of sagebrush.
“Think it’s the law?” Bud asked, as the truck got close enough so they could see several long antennas bristling from the roof. It was a new-model GMC, a Yukon or a Suburban.
“You have something to be scared of?” Joe asked.
“Of course not,” Bud said, but he looked jumpy. Bud was sitting on a downed log and he turned and looked behind him into the trees, as if planning an escape route. Joe thought how many times in the past his approach had likely caused the same kind of mild panic in hunters, fishermen, campers.
Joe asked, “Okay, what did you do now?”
“Nothing,” Bud Jr. said, but Joe had enough experience talking with guilty men to know something was up. The way they wouldn’t hold his gaze, the way they found something to do with their hands that wasn’t necessary, like Bud Jr., who was tearing off pieces of his bread crust and rolling them into little balls.
“She swore she was eighteen,” Bud said, almost as an aside, “and she sure as hell looked it. Shit, she was in the Stockman’s having cocktails, so I figured they must have carded her, right?”
Joe snorted and said nothing. It was interesting to him how an old-line, hard-assed three-generation rancher like Bud Longbrake could have raised a son so unlike him. Bud blamed his first wife for coddling Bud Jr., and complained in private to Joe that Missy, Bud’s second wife and Marybeth’s mother, was now doing the same thing. “Who the fuck cares if he’s creative,” Bud had said, spitting out the word as if it were a bug that had crawled into his mouth. “He’s as worthless as tits on a bull.”
In his peripheral vision, Joe watched as Bud Jr. stood up from his log as the SUV churned up the hill. He was ready to run.
It was then that Joe noticed the GMC had official State of Wyoming plates. Two men inside, the driver and another wearing a tie and a suit coat.
The GMC parked next to Joe’s Ford and the passenger door opened.
“Is one of you Joe Pickett?” asked the man in the tie. He looked vaguely familiar to Joe, somebody he might have seen in the newspaper. He was slightly built and had a once-eager face that now said, “I’m harried.” The man pulled a heavy jacket over his blazer an zipped it up against the cold breeze.
“He is,” Bud Jr. said quickly, pointing to Joe as if naming the defendant in court.
“I’m Chuck Ward, chief of staff for Governor Rulon,” the man said, looking Joe over as if he were disappointed with what he saw but trying to hide it. “The governor would like to meet with you as soon as possible.”
Joe stood and wiped his palms on his Wranglers so he could shake hands with Ward.
Joe said, “The governor is in town?”
“We came up in the state plane.”
“That was the jet we saw, Joe. Cool, the governor,” Bud Jr. said, obviously relieved that the GMC hadn’t come for him. “I’ve been reading about him in the paper. He’s a wild man, crazy as a tick. He challenged some senator to a drinking contest to settle an argument, and he installed a shooting range behind the governor’s mansion. That’s my kind of governor, man,” he said, grinning.
Ward shot Bud Jr. a withering look. Joe thought it was telling that Ward didn’t counter the stories but simply turned red.
“You want me to go with you?” Joe asked, nodding toward the GMC.
“Yes, please.”
“How about I follow you in,” Joe said. “I need to pick my girls up at school this afternoon so I need a vehicle. We’ll be done by then, I’d guess.”
Ward looked at him. “We have to be.”
Joe stuffed his gloves into his back pocket and picked up his tools from the ground and handed them to Bud Jr. “I’ll ask your dad to send someone out here to pick you up.”
Bud’s face fell. “You’re just leaving me here?”
“Get some work done,” Joe said, gesturing toward the fence that went on for miles. “Come on, Maxine,” he called to his dog.
Bud Jr. turned away and folded his arms across his chest in a pout.
“Quite a hand,” Ward said sarcastically as Joe walked past him toward the Ford.
“Yup,” Joe said.
THE GOVERNOR’S PLANE was the only aircraft on the tarmac at the Saddlestring Regional Airport. Joe followed Chuck Ward to a small parking lot at the side of the General Aviation building.
Joe had heard the stories about the drinking contest and the shooting range. Rulon was an enigma, which seemed to be part of his charm. A one-time high-profile defense lawyer, Rulon became a federal prosecutor who had a 95 percent conviction rate. Since the election, Joe had read stories in the newspaper about Rulon rushing out of his residence in his pajamas and a Russian fur cap to help state troopers on the scene of a twelve-car pileup on I-80. Another recounted how he’d been elected chairman of the Western Governors’ Association because of his reputation for taking on Washington bureaucrats and getting his way, which included calling hotel security to have all federal agency personnel escorted from the room of their first meeting. Each new story about Rulon’s eccentricities seemed to make him more popular with voters, despite the fact that he was a Democrat in a state that was 70 percent Republican.