“Get out of here!” he bellowed, and flung a pair of handcuffs from his belt. The cuffs arced through the air and landed with a jangle five feet in front of the wolf, and the animal turned with a lazy shrug and followed the silver wolf back into the shadows.
Joe stood for a moment, breathing hard, trying to hear where they’d gone, if anywhere. It was extremely rare for a wolf to attack a human in the wild. There were very few instances of its happening. But they’d certainly shadowed him for a mile or so, and he thought how appealing he must look to them: obviously wounded, caked with dried and fresh blood, without a serious weapon. He could imagine one of them darting across the creek and hamstringing him like wolves hamstrung elk and moose. Once their prey was incapacitated, the rest of the pack could move in.
He found a stout branch that was still heavy and green, that looked like it had been blasted from a tree by a lightning strike. The branch was nearly three feet long, bulbous on the butt end, and tapered like a baseball bat. His right shoulder was worthless, but he took a few practice swings with his left and the branch whistled cleanly through the air. He smacked the trunk of a pine tree with a reassuring thunk, which sent a shower of pine needles to the forest floor.
“Hear that?” he shouted into the air, hoping the wolves were listening. “That’ll be your head if you try to take a bite out of me!”
He could neither see nor hear where the wolves had gone, but despite his shouts and his club he didn’t think they’d gone far.
“Wolves this far south,” he thought, as he continued down the creek. “Wait until they hear about this in Cheyenne.”
Farther down the creek, Joe stumbled on a massive five-point elk antler that had been shed earlier that summer. He tossed the branch aside and picked up the antler, turning it and admiring the thick beam. One tine was sixteen inches long and an inch thick at the base. Forked tines on the end were six inches each and sharp as spear points. The antler was heavy but a hell of a weapon, he thought. Much better than a club.
If the wolves attacked he could really do some damage, he thought.
HIS MANTRA EVOLVED from a country-and-western rhythm into reggae and then into blues. Joe kept thinking about what had happened, what he’d seen, what he didn’t know.
Why was Terri Wade in an isolated cabin? What was her relationship with the Grim Brothers? What was with the store-bought picture frames containing promotional shots? And could that have possibly been who he thought it was with them? The girl? He shook his head, not able to wrap his mind around the prospect. Again, he thought he’d seen her visage too many times on fliers and in the newspapers. He’d imagined her, he was sure. But there had been four faces. That, he was convinced of.
And what about the brothers themselves? Why were they up there and what were they doing? What caused them to hide in one of the roughest and most remote sections of the least populated state in the union?
IT WAS ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLE how the terrain changed, how cottonwoods took over from the pine trees, how bunches of cheater grass replaced the pine needle floor. Without actually realizing it, Joe knew he’d descended from the mountains into a valley. He veered right away from the creek and the trees, and as the sun set he was on the edge of a hay meadow. Instead of the smell of pine and the dank vegetation of the creek, he smelled the sweet smell of cut hay and thought he caught a whiff of gasoline.
Joe turned and looked behind him. The mountains went up and back, peak after peak, until the range melded with the sky countless miles away. He was struck by how big the mountains were, how hulking, imposing, and still. And he was awed by the fact that he’d actually walked out of them.
At the edge of the timber, in the shadows, he saw the lone black wolf. He stood broadside, big and dark, his eyes seeing Joe much more clearly than Joe could see him. The wolf stood as if he were prevented from coming any closer, as if he’d hit his boundary line and could proceed no farther.
Joe nodded toward the wolf, whom he respected for tenacity, and said, “See you later.”
AS HE BROKE OVER A RISE, the hay meadow was spread out before him as far as he could see. Cut hay, smelling even sharper now, lay thick in long straight channels. After days of mountain randomness, he was impressed by the symmetry of the rows.
A half mile away, a green John Deere hay baler crawled across the field, its motor humming and grunting as it turned rows of cut hay into fifty-pound bales that it left behind like tractor scat. It was dark enough the rancher had his headlights on, and the twin pools of yellow made the hay look golden and the cut field an electric green carpet.
As Joe walked toward the baler with the antler in his hand, something in his brain released and his wounds exploded in sudden pain. It was as if now that his rescue was at hand, the mental dam holding everything back for three days suddenly burst from the strain.
His legs gave way and he fell to his knees and pitched forward into the cut hay.
The mantra slowed to a dirge. “Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April . . .”
IN THE DARK, what seemed like hours later, he heard a boy say, “Hey, Dad, look over here. It’s that damned game warden everyone’s looking for.”
PART TWO
RELOADING WITHOUT BULLETS
He is mad past recovery, but yet he has luci intervals.
—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
11
ON THE THIRD DAY OF HIS STAY IN THE BILLINGS HOSPITAL, after he’d been moved out of the intensive care unit, Joe awoke to find a tall, thin man in ill-fitting clothes—white dress shirt, open collar, loose tie, overlarge sports jacket—hovering near the foot of his bed. The man had world-weary brown eyes and a thin neck rising like a cornstalk out of the gaping collar of his shirt. His hair was light brown, peppered with silver. A pair of smudged reading glasses hung from a cord around his neck. Joe got the immediate impression the man was or had been in law enforcement. His aura of legal bureaucracy was palpable. He said, “Joe Pickett? I’m Bobby McCue, DCI.”
Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigation.
McCue reached into his jacket with long spidery fingers and came out with a shiny black wallet, which he flipped open to reveal a badge. Just as quickly, and before Joe could focus on the shield or credential card, he snapped it shut and slid it back inside his coat.
“I read the statement you gave the sheriff down in Carbon County,” McCue said. “I was hoping I could ask you a few more questions just to clarify some things. We’re trying to fill in some of the gaps.”
“What gaps?” Joe raised his eyebrows, which elicited a sharp pain where they’d removed the shotgun pellet behind his ear and stitched it closed. The skin on his face seemed pulled tight from scalp to chin and ear to ear, and it hurt to do much more than blink his eyes.
“Nothing major,” McCue said. “You know how this works.”
“I should by now, yes.”
Joe had already given statements to Carbon County Sheriff Ron Baird, Baggs Police Department Chief Brian Lally, his departmental supervisor, and the Game and Fish Department investigator assigned to the case. Although Joe had absolutely no reason to lie about anything, he was concerned there could be contradictions or problems if all the statements were compared. Each investigator had asked basically the same questions but in different ways, and Joe had no control or approval over what they wrote down when he answered. Even though what had happened in the mountains was clear in his mind, it was possible that his statements, when laid side-by-side, might not completely jibe. It was the nature of the game, and one played—sometimes unfairly—by investigators, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. Joe had played it himself. So he knew to be alert and careful each time he was questioned. He couldn’t afford to be sloppy or offhand. He wished he could recall more of the interrogation by Baird immediately after he’d been rescued, when his head was still cloudy with exhaustion and his wounds were fresh. He hoped he hadn’t said something he’d come to regret.