The bolt on the lock didn’t fit snugly into the doorframe, despite Joe’s putting his shoulder to it. So in addition to attaching the chain lock — which was lamely held by two small screws to a three-quarter-inch strip of plywood — Joe wedged the top of the only hard-backed chair in the room under the knob. He dropped the saddlebags on the seat of the chair to give it some weight.
He plugged in his cell phone to recharge, then jacked a shell into the receiver of his shotgun and propped it in the corner near the headboard. The .40 Glock went on the floor on the right side of his bed so he could reach down in the dark and raise it quickly if necessary.
The bedsprings moaned as he flopped back on the bed fully dressed. It was two-thirty in the morning and the inn was quiet except for snoring sounds through the thin wall behind him.
If he was going to try to get some sleep, he thought, he had a three-hour window before hunters started getting up and pounding on one another’s doors and wrestling guns and gear down the hallways.
Joe shut off the light and closed his eyes but couldn’t will himself to sleep. Nate was in the hills, there’d been a bomb under his pickup, and in the morning Templeton’s minions would be looking for him.
He settled in for a short and miserable night.
23
“What do you mean, not until tomorrow?” Joe said angrily to Chuck Coon.
“Realistically, it may be a couple of days.”
“Are you sure? In a couple of days, I may be dead.”
“Have you looked outside?”
He grunted as he swung to his feet and limped to the window. His lower back ached from sleeping on the sagging mattress.
Fifteen inches of snow covered the ground outside, and it was still coming down. The pine forest had been transformed into two tones: white and gray. Trees looked ghostly through the falling snow, and the hills looked quiet and muted — as if everything was on hold for a while.
“It’s worse in Cheyenne because the wind has kicked up as usual,” Coon said. “Everything’s closed — the airport, the interstates, the schools. Half my guys didn’t even make it in this morning. What a freak damn storm. They didn’t even predict it. It’s just like you wake up and it’s a whiteout.”
Joe groaned.
He’d spent the previous thirty minutes on the phone with Coon — pausing only to take a quick call from Marybeth to say he’d call her back — recapping all that had gone on the night before and what he suspected. Coon admonished him for dismantling the bomb instead of leaving it intact for forensics, but he was as intrigued as Joe was about locating Nate Romanowski. In fact, the agent-in-charge seemed almost jaunty — which rubbed Joe the wrong way. Joe’s story had energized Coon to a surprising degree, Joe thought. The man was on the hunt now, armed with real evidence. Joe understood the feeling but couldn’t share it because of his circumstances. The dreary hotel room, lack of sleep, and growing fear that he’d be found by Critchfield and the others didn’t allow him to share Coon’s enthusiasm.
Coon spoke as if he were thinking out loud: “We finally have actionable evidence on the operation up there, thanks to our midnight bombers. You can personally identify the four of them, right?”
“Right.”
“Did you get any photos?”
“No.”
“I wish you had.”
“Chuck, I didn’t even think of it at the time, and I’m not sure I could have risked it.” Joe paused and said, “But they don’t know that.”
Coon chuckled. “We might be able to suggest you did, is what you’re saying. Something like, ‘What would you say if you found out that Joe Pickett took a camera-phone shot of the four of you together in the sheriff’s SUV?’ And see what they do.”
“Yup.”
“If we can get somebody to talk — and we now have four suspects — one or more of them might give us something we can build on. I’m particularly interested in sweating this Bill Critchfield. He might be our link between the bomb under your truck and Wolfgang Templeton.”
“That’s why I made that stupid call to your voice message yesterday. I was trying to flush them out.”
“And just maybe it worked. I still can’t condone all your methods, though.”
“Oh well,” Joe said.
They talked about sending state DCI and federal evidence techs to search the ranch with sonar for buried bodies.
Coon said, “That makes it even more important we do this right. From what you’re telling me, we need to storm that county with every man we’ve got and grab them all at once before they know what’s happening, so we can isolate the four bombers from each other. We can’t pick them up one by one or they might warn the rest in the food chain. So that means we need at least four arrest teams and maybe even extra manpower from South Dakota or Montana. I need my full forensics team to go over that motel cabin to pull out the spy gear you say is there, and the bomb experts to go over that device you found. We need to get approval from D.C. for an operation on that scale.”
“How long will that take?” Joe asked.
“Like I said, a couple of days. You know how the bureaucracy works — or doesn’t.”
“I want to get out of here as soon as I can,” Joe said, parting the moth-eaten curtains with the back of his hand to look outside again. Most of the hunting vehicles were long gone. Nothing excited hunters more than fresh snow to track game. “Everybody knows everybody around here. It may not take them long to figure out where I am.”
“I’ll make some calls,” Coon said. “I’ll call you back after I’ve talked to D.C. Guys are slowly making their way in here now, so I’ll have a better idea of what kind of manpower we’ve got by this afternoon. I’ll also give the heads-up to Rulon that his range rider might have broken this thing wide open. He’ll need to give us his blessing to proceed, because he’s said in the past—many times—that he’d arrest any federal official who takes action in the state without his approval.”
Joe noted the disdain in Coon’s tone, and it made him smile.
Coon continued, “I don’t think there’ll be any problem this time, since he was the one who sent you up there. But keep in mind even if everything goes perfectly, it’s still five hours from here to there on the roads. There’s no way we can fly up there in this weather. So you’ll need to just lie low and stay off their radar until we can get there.”
“I thought I was supposed to make my report and go home,” Joe said. “That was the deal.”
“That deal is no longer operable,” Coon laughed. “Now we need you to stay. It’ll make a big difference that you’re with us when we brace those four bombers — especially that other game warden. They need to see your face and know that you can place them at the motel last night. That’ll turn the heat up on them. Make sense?”
“Yeah,” Joe said, discouraged.
Coon mused, “I’m thinking that even without the definitive photo of them together from you, we can still pull trace and DNA evidence from inside the sheriff’s vehicle that will put them at the scene. Not to mention fingerprints and trace from the bomb itself. Where did you say it was now?”
“In a safe place,” Joe said.
Coon paused. “What does that mean?”
“I hid it someplace they won’t think to look for it. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“But what if—”
Joe finished Coon’s thought for him. “What if they get to me and by the time you get up here, I’m not around to show you where it is or place them at the scene? Well, maybe that’ll give you another reason to get things moving on your end.”