Charlie quickly looked left and right before speaking, and then leaned closer until his hat brim touched the fence.
"Our duty isn't to question." Charlie bit out the words. "We don't know the reasons these targets were chosen and that's good. All we know is that a lot of thought has gone into this and they've got the whole thing figured out. We just follow orders."
"No one's questioning anything," the Old Man answered, his tone deliberate. He wondered why Charlie seemed so defensive.
Charlie sized up the Old Man again, his light blue eyes raking across the Old Man's face like talons.
"Saddlestring, Wyoming," Charlie spoke in a voice that was barely audible over the amplified swimming pool sounds from elsewhere in the complex. "That rumor about Stewie Woods isn't going away. Now it's that he--or somebody pretending to be Stewie Woods--is contacting his old
colleagues."
The Old Man felt a rush of anger. "That's not possible. You know that's not possible." Charlie nodded. "It's probably one of his hangers-on trying to get something going. But we have to check it out."
"It's not possible," the Old Man said again, shaking his head, trying unsuccessfully to come up with a scenario where Woods could have walked away from that explosion.
"And there's something else," Charlie said. "Because this guy, whoever he is, is pretending to be Stewie Woods, the local game warden in Saddlestring is snooping around. Other law enforcement might follow. That's heat we don't need. So we need to squash this pretender as quickly as possible."
"Do they have any idea who the pretender is?" the Old Man asked.
"Not yet," Charlie answered, narrowing his eyes. "But they expect they will shortly"
Part Two.
Early in April of 1887, some of the boys came down from the Pleasant Valley, where there was a big rustler war going on and the rustlers were getting the best of the game.. .. Things were in a pretty bad condition. It was war to the knife between cowboys and the rustlers, and there was a battle every time the two outfits ran together. A great many men were killed in the war.
from Tom Horn, The Life of Tom Horn: government Scout and Interpreter, 1904
It was a month after elk-calving season in the Bighorns and Joe Pickett was doing a preliminary trend count. The purpose of the trend count was to assess how the elk had wintered, and how many babies had been born to replenish the herd. The season for calves was generally May 20 through June 30, so all of the new ones should have dropped. He rode near the tree line on his buckskin, Lizzie, looking down the slope into the meadows and brush for the elk. It was one of those rare, perfect, vibrant July mornings that pulsed with color and scent. Wildflowers were bursting open in the meadows like strings of mute fireworks, and saplings were stretching sunward after recently breaking out of the solitary confinement of the snowpack. Swollen narrow stream beds were flexing their muscles with runoff. Summer was here, and it was in a hurry.
The cow elk used the tall sagebrush just below the tree line for calving, and Joe had found seven elk cows and six month-old newborns so far. It was a good year for elk given the fairly mild winter and the moist spring. He could smell their particular musty presence even before he saw the first mother and calf. The mothers eyed him wanly as he quietly rode by in the shadows of the trees. One tried to lure him away from her calf by fully exposing herself in the meadow and trotting through the open field toward the opposite rise. She stopped in clear view to look over her shoulder, and snorted when Joe rode on and didn't pursue. Her calf looked at him through a fork in the tall brush. The calf was all eyes and ears, and Joe was close enough to see a bead of condensation on the calfs black snout.
Joe rode deeper into the trees and further up the mountainside until the mother elk turned back to her calf. He goosed Lizzie through the timber, toward a patch of sunlight that became a small grassy park and dismounted. He tied up his horse and sat on a downed log, where he stretched out and let the sun warm his legs. Pouring a cup of coffee from his battered Thermos, he tipped up the brim of his hat and sighed. The coffee was still hot. Joe had put off doing any serious thinking until he was in the mountains, hoping the quiet solace of the outdoors would help him find the answers he was looking for. Now, he reviewed the particularly odd chain of events that had that started with Jim Finotta getting to Sandvick and Judge Pennock's refusal to advance Joe's charges against Finotta.
Judge Cohn in Johnson County had reluctantly agreed to review the charges against Finotta but had yet to take any action. It was very likely that the charges, and the case, would go nowhere. The previous day, Joe had received a call from Robey Hersig saying that Judge Pennock was furious with him--and Joe, for taking the case out of the county Hersig reported that Finotta was burning up the telephone lines between his law office in Saddlestring and the governor's office in Cheyenne.
Joe was being accused of engaging in a vendetta against Finotta. Words like "harassment," "land owner abuse," and "bureaucratic arrogance" had been used. It wouldn't be long, Joe knew, before he heard something from Game and Fish headquarters in Cheyenne. He could imagine the furtive meetings and hand-wringing that was almost definitely going on at headquarters over what he had done. If the governor got involved, which was likely the issue would be elevated immediately probably to the office of director. It wouldn't be the first time he'd gotten in trouble, and probably wouldn't be the last time. He hoped if the boys at headquarters in Cheyenne decided to admonish him that they'd do it in a straightforward manner, but sometimes that was too much to expect from them.
If it weren't for mornings like this in a place like this, Joe thought, they could have this job.
He was not very good about letting things drop, Joe decided. It wasn't as if elk were an endangered species. There were tens of thousands of elk in the state, and probably more than there should be. Elk were killed every day by cars, disease, and predators. Hunters harvested thousands every fall. Other elk would replace dead elk.
But a huge bull elk had been killed out of season by a man who simply wanted the head of the animal on his wall. The elk's headless, massive body was left where it fell, and seven hundred pounds of meat left to rot. And nobody, it seemed, was as outraged about the crime as Joe Pickett was. For reasons he had trouble defining, he had taken this particular offense personally
It wasn't that Jim Finotta was a millionaire lawyer, or a rancher, or a developer. Joe didn't harbor any ill will toward successful men. What outraged Joe was the casualness of the crime and Finotta's reaction when accused.
Most poachers Joe caught lied about their crime when confronted. But Finotta lied with contempt and a haughty arrogance that suggested that it was somehow beneath him to have to waste his good, valuable lies on the likes of Joe. Jim Finotta didn't need a trophy head on his wall for any other reason than to impress his guests and boost his own sense of worth. He certainly didn't need the meat, like a lot of poachers and hunters, but instead of giving it away or donating it to a shelter in town, he left it. If it was just a trophy Finotta had wanted, he could have hired a guide and hunted the elk in season like a sportsman. Instead, Finotta chose to shoot the bull elk offseason, when no one else could hunt it, order his lackeys to behead it, cover up the crime when accused, and use his influence and connections to discredit his accuser. As Robey Hersig had put it, the assholes usually won. But Joe had more than just Jim Finotta on his mind.