Force of Nature (37 page)

McLanahan shook his head. “I can’t just arrest a guy and hold him without charges.”

“You forget who you’re talking to,” Joe said, and laughed. “You do it all the time. And besides, I’m sure I’ll be the one to press charges against him.”

The sheriff looked away for a moment, then back to Joe with a squint in his eyes.

“Why do we need a SWAT team to bring him in? He don’t look like much.”

“Because he’s not who he says he is, I told you that,” Joe said. “He’s got weapons and he may be highly trained. You don’t want anyone to get hurt, do you? Hit him fast and hard, and assume he’s dangerous.”

McLanahan shook his head as if he couldn’t believe how ridiculous Joe was acting.

“Plus,” Joe said, “you might need that assembled SWAT team later this morning. I think I know where our bad guy is located. Once it’s confirmed, I’ll give you the word.”

“Bullshit,” McLanahan said. “Tell me what you know.”

Joe shook his head. “Not until I’m sure.”

“Damn you, this is my county. You can’t be running your own deal here. I’ve got jurisdiction and you know it.”

Joe took a step toward McLanahan, which surprised the sheriff.

“What I know,” Joe said, nodding toward the restaurant where Sollis stood watching them from inside the window, “is you’ve surrounded yourself with thugs and idiots. That’s why I want your assurance that Reed will be on the team this morning, so there’s at least one competent officer. And make sure you tell them all to stay off the radio. Brueggemann and others are likely monitoring your frequency. He’ll know you’re coming, and we don’t want that.

“And if you send your goons out there before I pinpoint our bad guy, you could tip him off or get your goons killed. Or get my friend killed. Or get me killed.”

“Your friend?” McLanahan said, perking up. “Romanowski’s involved?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Joe said. “But if he is, I don’t want you risking his life.”

“You’re really pissing me off,” McLanahan said. “I don’t need to do anything if I don’t want to. This is my county and my investigation.”

“Understood,” Joe said. “But imagine what people will say about you if everything explodes today and you decided to sit it out. I can’t imagine that would help your reelection chances much.”

McLanahan glared at Joe and then surprised him with a long, slow grin.

“You think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” he asked.

“Nope,” Joe said, “not at all. I just know that being sheriff is the only thing you know how to do because you’d get eaten up in the real world. You want to keep this job as if your life depended on it, which in some ways it probably does.”

The smile vanished.

“You said there were three things,” McLanahan said, his tone flat.

“That’s right. Call the FBI in Cheyenne and request assistance immediately. Tell them you might have a firefight up here and you need a federal strike team.”

McLanahan turned away and stomped his foot in the slush.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Joe said.

After a few smoldering moments, the sheriff said, “If this doesn’t all work out, I’m holding you personally responsible. You better understand that. I’ll hold a press conference and name names, and the governor and your director will hear from me.”

Joe shrugged. “If it
does
work out, you might have a chance of being sheriff again, as miserable as
that
will be for everybody.”

As McLanahan fumed, Joe walked back toward his pickup. “Keep your cell phone on and stay close to the radio,” Joe said over his shoulder. “I’ll call you as soon as I know if you need to send your goons in.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” McLanahan growled.

Joe said, “I just did.”

JOE CLICKED
his radio over to the county frequency while he drove through town toward the mountains. He wanted to monitor traffic as well as he could, and hoped the arrest of Brueggemann would go down as smoothly and safely as possible. And that he wouldn’t hear a word about it until the arrest was made.

Then he called Mike Reed on his cell phone and woke Reed up.

“You’re supposed to be on a plane,” Reed said sleepily.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Joe said. “But in the meanwhile, I need to let you know what’s going on and apologize to you in advance.”

“Apologize for what?” Reed asked.

Joe sighed and told him the story. There was silence on the other end.

Finally, Reed said, “Don’t apologize, Joe. If we get the bad guys, it’s all worth it, whether I win or not. McLanahan’s still a fool, no matter what happens.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

“Well,” he said, “it sounds like I better get dressed and drag my butt into the office.”

HE SAW
a few elk hunters road-hunting on his way up Bighorn Road. When they saw his green truck, they pulled over to be checked, but he waved and kept going.

His plan was under way, but he didn’t trust McLanahan not to figure out a way to screw it up.

He looked at his watch and guessed Marybeth and the girls would be able to see the tentlike architecture of Denver International out the window of their Beechcraft.

And he wondered where Nate Romanowski was, and hoped his friend would call. Immediately.

For the second time since he’d left the airport, he drove past his house. Unlike the last time, though, Joe noted a set of tire tracks that veered off the road in the snow near the mailbox, and large boot prints going to and from his box.

Since it was much too early for mail, Joe stopped, left his pickup running, and got out. The boot prints looked familiar, and a rush of excitement shot through him.

Joe opened the door of the mailbox and saw the glint of bronze inside. He reached in and grasped the thick, heavy cartridge between his fingers, and read the stamp on the back: .500 wyoming express fa. The FA stood for Freedom Arms, where the revolver and the cartridge were manufactured.

He slid the cartridge in the front pocket of his Wranglers as he strode back to his pickup.

This is it
, he thought.

JOE DROVE
through Crazy Woman Campground, where he’d first encountered Luke Brueggemann. There were a few hard-side camper trailers in tucked-away campsites. As he passed one, several hunters were lashing camo packs onto the backs of ATVs with bungee cords. The hunters looked up, saw the green pickup with the game warden inside, and stopped what they were doing. One large man with a full beard and a coffee mug in his paw instinctively reached for his wallet to pull out his elk license and ID. Joe tipped the brim of his hat to them as he drove slowly by.

Catch you next time
, he thought.

The morning sun had yet to soften or melt the snowfall from the night before in the deep timber. There were three to four inches of it covering the two-track that exited out the back of the campground. At least one ATV was ahead of him, marked by wide tracks and knobby impressions in the snow.

The road got rougher less than a half mile from the campground as it rose up into the trees. Joe reached down below the dashboard and clicked the toggle switch to four-wheel-high. The old road was overgrown and little used since the Forest Service had placed a moratorium
on cattle grazing on federal leases high in the mountains, and it no longer appeared on topo maps of the area. But local hunters and poachers knew of it, as did Joe, because it was a back route along the side of the mountain that eventually emptied onto a plateau overlooking the South Fork of the Twelve Sleep River. Below the plateau was the location of the eleven outfitter camps. They were strung out along the river, each three to four miles from the next. The camps were accessed by the South Fork Trail, which loosely followed the bends and contours of the serpentine river.

The logging road Joe was on paralleled the South Fork Trail but on the other side of the mountain, and the two roads never crossed the water and intersected.

Joe thought of the conversation he’d had with Luke Brueggemann that first day when he showed the trainee the locations for the camps. Ten were occupied by familiar local outfitter names, he told Brueggemann. One was unfamiliar.

Because the permits for the camps were issued through the local office of the U.S. Forest Service and not Joe’s agency, there was no way for Joe to look up the names of the permittees. Although the USFS was supposed to forward the list of outfitters every year, a combination of bureaucracy, other priorities, and general malaise that formed between state and federal agencies usually delayed the arrival of the list until well after hunting season, when it did Joe no good. But he wished he could see the list now. Especially the new permittee who had obtained Camp Five.

Joe realized he’d misread Brueggemann’s reticent reaction to inspecting the camps that morning, assuming it had to do with riding horses up to them. But now Joe understood, or thought he did. Because it had to do with who had set up in Camp Five. Brueggemann, Joe guessed, was wary because he was taken by surprise by the plan
and wanted to alert the occupant, but it would be difficult to do on horseback with Joe there, not to mention they’d be in and out of cell phone coverage. How relieved Brueggemann had been that morning when the ride got called off, Joe recalled. Now it made sense, and it had nothing to do with his horses.

THE TREES
closed in on the old road the higher Joe climbed his pickup. Boughs heavy with snow dumped their loads on the cab of his pickup as he brushed under them. He picked his way slowly and cautiously up the road to avoid getting stuck or hitting a fallen tree obscured by the snow, but also to keep the engine whine of his pickup as low as possible.

He had no radio or cell phone reception so deep in the timber, and he checked both periodically. On top, he knew, he would break through the thick trees and emerge above the timberline, where he might catch a signal before plunging back down the other side.

He took a slow blind corner to the left through the trees and was surprised to see four massive bull elk barreling straight toward him down the road, their antlers catching glints of morning sun, their nostrils firing spouts of condensation, their eyes white and wild. He stomped on his brake pedal as one of the bulls nearly crashed into his grille but spun to the right at the last second and crashed headlong through the brush and timber on the side of the old road. The three others—a magnificent six-by-six, a five-by-five, and a young spike—all followed. Even with his windows closed to prevent snow from coming inside the cab, Joe could hear the sharp cracking of branches as the bulls barreled down the mountainside, kicking up pine needles and clumps of dark mulch in their wake.

Just as suddenly as the appearance of the elk, a red ATV—the vehicle
that had gone up the road before him—and two hunters roared around a blind corner ahead in pursuit of the elk. The driver was bent over the handlebars and the passenger behind him had his rifle out and pointed forward as if his plan had been to shoot from the moving vehicle. When the driver looked up and saw the green pickup, his mouth dropped open, but he stopped quickly and started a long skid in the mud and snow that came to a halt a few feet from Joe’s front bumper.

For a moment, Joe glared through his windshield at the driver and the shooter. The driver, a thick and wide dark-haired man with a weeklong hunting beard, flushed red with anger and trepidation. The shooter, who looked to be a younger and hairier version of the driver, was simply peeved.

Because the trees on each side of the road were so thick and close, neither vehicle could proceed without the other getting out of the way.

Joe sighed and opened his door and climbed out. He clamped his Stetson tight on his head and indicated for the driver to kill his motor, which burbled loudly like a Harley-Davidson wannabe.

The driver reached down and turned the key, and suddenly the forest was still, except for the distant sound of branches snapping and breaking as the elk thundered farther and farther away down the hillside.

He could hear the shooter growl a colorful stream of curses.

“How’s it going, guys?” Joe asked.

“Just great,” the driver sighed, “until you showed up. We’ve been up here busting our ass looking for elk for seven days without seeing a goddamn one, and then last night it snows and we ride right into them.”

“Yup, I saw ’em,” Joe said, indicating the churned-up path in the snow where the elk bolted into the timber.

“Then you showed up and fucked it up,” the shooter said, sitting back and propping the rifle on his thigh, the barrel in the air.

Joe nodded. He’d found over the years that his silence often produced confessions and was more effective than talking.

After a few beats of Joe simply looking at them, the driver said, “I guess we were acting kind of stupid chasing them like that.”

Joe nodded.

“And I guess my son here shouldn’t be trying to pop them from the back of a four-wheeler.”

“Nope.”

“And I
think
we’re still in our hunting area,” the driver said, raising his palms in an exaggerated way. “At least I hope so. It’s harder than hell to tell sometimes. I mean, it ain’t like you guys mark where one area ends and the other one starts.”