Free Fire (3 page)

“Nothing wrong with being a cowboy,” Rulon said.

“Nope.”

“Hell, we put one on our license plates. Do you remember when we met?”

“Yes.”

“It was at that museum dedication last spring. I took you and your lovely wife for a little drive. How is she, by the way? Marybeth, right?”

“She’s doing fine,” Joe said, thinking,
He remembered her name
. “She’s got a company that’s really doing well.”

“MBP Management.”

Amazing
, Joe thought.

“And the kids? Two girls?”

“Sheridan’s fifteen, in ninth grade. Lucy’s ten, in fourth grade.”

“And they say I have a tough job,” Rulon said. “Beautiful girls. You should be proud. A couple of real pistols.”

Joe shifted in his chair, disarmed.

“When we met,” the governor continued, “I gave you a little pop quiz. I asked you if you’d arrest me for fishing without a licenselike you did my predecessor. Do you remember me askingyou that?”

“Yes,” Joe said, flushing.

“Do you remember what you said?”

“I said I’d arrest you.”

Chuck Ward shot a disapproving glance at Joe when he heard that.

The governor laughed, sat back. “That impressed me.”

Joe didn’t know it had. He and Marybeth had debated it at the time.

Rulon said, “So when we were in the air on the way to Powell,I was reading through a file that is keeping me up nights and I saw the Bighorns and I thought of Joe Pickett. I ordered my pilotto land and told Chuck to go find you. How would you like to work for the state again?”

Joe didn’t see it coming.

Chuck Ward squirmed in his chair and looked out the windowat the plane as if he wished he were on it.

Joe said, “Doing what?”

Rulon reached out and took a thick manila file off one of the stacks and slid it across the table. Joe picked it up and read the tab. It read “Yellowstone Zone of Death.”

Joe looked up, his mouth dry.

“That’s what they’re calling it,” Rulon said. “You’ve heard about the situation, no doubt.”

“Everybody has.”

The case had been all over the state, regional, and national news the past summer—a multiple homicide in Yellowstone National Park. The murderer confessed, but a technicality in the law had set him free.

“It’s making me crazy and pissing me off,” Rulon said. “Not just the murders or that gasbag Clay McCann. But this.”

Rulon reached across the table and threw open the file. On top was a copy of a short, handwritten letter addressed to the governor.

“Read it,” Rulon said.

It was signed Yellowstone Dick.

Joe frowned. He noted the date stamp: July 15.

“I don’t understand,” Joe said.

“I didn’t either,” Rulon said, raising his eyebrows and leaning forward again. “I try to answer all of my mail, but I put that one aside when I got it. I wasn’t sure what to do, since it seems like a crank letter. I get ’em all the time, believe me. Finally, I sent a copy over to DCI and asked them to check up on it. It took ’em a month, damn them, but they traced it with the Internet people and got back to me and said Yellowstone Dick was the nickname of an employee in Yellowstone named Rick Hoening. That name ring a bell?”

“No.”

“He was one of the victims murdered by Clay McCann. The e-mail was sent to me a week before Hoening met his untimely demise.”

Joe let that sink in.

“Ever hear of the Gopher State Five?”

Joe shook his head.

“Me neither. And I’ll never know what he was talking about, especially that bit about deeply impacting my cash flow. You know how serious that could be, don’t you?”

Joe nodded. The State of Wyoming was booming. Mineral severance taxes from coal, gas, and petroleum extraction were making state coffers flush. So much money was coming in that legislators couldn’t spend it fast enough and were squirreling it away into massive trust funds and only spending the interest. The excess billions allowed the governor to feed the beast like it had never been fed before.

Joe felt overwhelmed. “What are you asking me?”

Rulon beamed and swung his head toward Chuck Ward. Ward stared coolly back.

“I want you to go up there and see if you can figure out what the hell Yellowstone Dick was writing to me about.”

Joe started to object but Rulon waved him off. “I know what you’re about to say. I’ve got DCI and troopers and lawyers up the wazoo. But the problem is I don’t have jurisdiction. It’s NationalPark Service, and I can’t just send all my guys up there to kick ass and take names. We have to make requests, and the responsestake months to get back. We have to be
invited
in,” he said, screwing up his face on the word
invited
as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “It’s in my state, look at the map. But I can’t go in unless they
invite
me. The Feds don’t care about what YellowstoneDick said about my cash flow, they’re so angry about McCanngetting off. Not that I blame them, of course. But I want you to go up there and see what you can find out. Clay McCann got away with these murders and created a free-fire zone in the northern part of my state, and I won’t stand for it.”

Joe’s mind swirled.

“You’re unofficial,” Rulon said, his eyes gleaming. “Without portfolio. You’re not my official representative, although you are. You’ll be put back into the state system, you’ll get back pay, you’ll get your pension and benefits back, you’ll get a state paycheck with a nice raise. But you’re on your own. You’re nobody,just a dumb-ass game warden poking around by yourself.”

Joe almost said,
That I can do with no problem
, but held his tongue. Instead, he looked to Ward for clarification. “We’ll tell Randy Pope to reinstate you as a game warden,” Ward said wearily, wanting no part of this. “But the administration will
borrow
you.”

“Borrow me?” Joe said. “Pope won’t do it.”

“The hell he won’t,” Rulon said, smacking his palm against the tabletop. “I’m the governor. He will do what I tell him, or he’ll have
his
résumé out in five states.”

Joe knew how state government worked. This wasn’t how.

“Without portfolio,” Joe said, repeating the phrases. “
Not
your official representative. But I am.”

“Now you’re getting it,” the governor said, encouraging Joe. “And that means if you screw up and get yourself in trouble, as you are fully capable of doing based on your history, I’ll deny to my grave this meeting took place.”

Chuck Ward broke in. “Governor, I feel it’s my responsibility,once again, to advise against this.”

“Your opinion, Chuck, would be noted in the minutes if we had any, but we don’t,” Rulon said in a tone that suggested to Joe that the two of them had similar disagreements as a matter of routine.

The governor turned back to Joe. “You’re going to ask me why, and why you, when I have a whole government full of bodies to choose from.”

“I was going to ask you that.”

“All I can say is that it’s a hunch. But I’m known for my good hunches. I’ve followed your career, Joe, even before I got elected. You seem to have a natural inclination to get yourself square into the middle of situations a normal thinking person would avoid. I’d say it’s a gift if it wasn’t so damned dangerous at times. Your wife would probably concur.”

Joe nodded in silent agreement.

“I think you’ve got integrity. You showed me that when you said you’d arrest me. You seem to be able to think for yourself—a rare trait, and one that I share—no matter what the policy is or conventional wisdom dictates. As I know, that’s eithera good quality or a fatal flaw. It got me elected governor of this great state, and it got you fired.

“But you have a way of getting to the bottom of things, is what I see. Just ask the Scarlett brothers.” He raised his eyebrowsand said, “No, don’t.
They’re all dead
.”

Joe felt like he’d been slapped. He’d been there when the brothers turned against each other and went to war. And he’d performed an act that was the source of such black shame in him he still couldn’t think about it. In his mind, the months of feeding cattle, fixing fences, and overseeing Bud Jr. weren’t even close to penance for what he’d done. And it had nothing to do with why he’d been fired.

“When I think of crime committed out-of-doors, I think of Joe Pickett,” Rulon said. “Simple as that.”

Joe’s face felt hot. Everything the governor said seemed to have dual meanings. He couldn’t be sure if he was being praised or accused, or both.

“I don’t know what to say.”

Rulon smiled knowingly. “Yes you do. You want to say YES! You want to shout it out!” He leaned back in his chair and dropped his voice an octave. “But you need to talk to Marybeth. And Bud Longbrake needs to hire a new ranch foreman.”

“I do need to talk to Marybeth,” Joe said lamely.

“Of course. But let me know by tonight so we can notify Mr. Pope and get this show on the road. Take the file, read it. Then call with your acceptance.”

Ward tapped his wrist. “Governor . . .”

“I know,” Rulon said, standing and shoving papers into his briefcase. “I know.”

Joe used the arms of his chair to push himself to his feet. His legs were shaky.

“Tell the pilot we’re ready,” Rulon said to Ward. “We need to get going.”

Ward hustled out of the room, followed by Governor Rulon.

“Governor,” Joe called after him. Rulon hesitated at the doorway.

“I may need some help in the park,” Joe said, thinking of Nate Romanowski.

“Do what you need to do,” Rulon said sharply. “Don’t ask me for permission. You’re not working for me. I can’t even rememberwho you are. You’re fading from my mind even as we speak. How can I possibly keep track of every state employee?”

Outside, the engines of the plane began to wind up.

“Call me,” the governor said.

Joe’s head was still spinning from the meeting as he wheeled the Ford into the turn-in at Saddlestring Elementary. Lucy was standing outside with her books clutched to her chest in the midst of a gaggle of fourth-grade girls who were talking to one another with great arm-waving exuberance. When all the girls turned their faces to him and watched him pull up to the curb, he knew something was up. Lucy waved good-bye to her friends—Lucy was a popular girl—and climbed in. As always, Lucy looked as fresh and attractive as she had at breakfast.

“Sheridan’s in big trouble,” Lucy said. “She got a detention, so we’ll have to wait for her.”

“What do you mean, big trouble?” Joe asked sharply. He wished Lucy hadn’t told him her news with such obvious glee. He continued to drive the four blocks to the high school, where Sheridan had just started the month before.

“Some boy said something at lunch and Sherry decked him,” Lucy said. “Knocked him right down to the floor, is what I heard.”

“That doesn’t sound like Sheridan,” Joe said.

“It would if you knew her better.” Lucy smiled. “She’s a hot-headwhen it comes to her family.”

Joe pulled over to the curb and turned to Lucy, realizing he had misread his youngest daughter. She was proud of her sister, not happy with the fact that she was in trouble. “What exactly are you telling me?”

“Everybody’s talking about it,” Lucy said. “Some boy made a crack about you in the lunchroom, and Sheridan decked him.”

“About me?”

Lucy nodded. “He said something about you not being the game warden anymore, that you got fired.”

“Who was the boy?”

“Jason Kiner.”

That stung. Jason was Phil Kiner’s son. Kiner was the game warden who had been assigned Joe’s district by Randy Pope. Joe had always liked Phil, but was disturbed that Kiner never called him for background or advice since assuming the post and moving his family into Joe’s old house near Wolf Mountain.Joe assumed Pope had told Phil to steer clear of the former inhabitant.

“And Sheridan hit him?”

Lucy nodded eagerly, watching him closely for his reaction.

Joe took a deep breath and shook his head sadly, thinking it was what he should do as a father when he really wanted to say,
Good for Sheridan
.

Joe and lucy waited a half-hour in front of the high school for Sheridan to be released. Lucy worked on homework assignedby her teacher, Mrs. Hanson, and Joe thought about how he would present the opportunity the governor had given him to Marybeth. He had mixed feelings about it, even though Rulon had been right that Joe’s first reaction had been to yell
Yes!
The “Yellowstone Zone of Death” file was facedown on the bench seat between them.

“Mrs. Hanson says Americans use up most of the world’s energy,” Lucy said. “She says we’re selfish and we need to learn how to conserve so we can help save our planet.”

“Oh?” Joe said. Lucy loved her teacher, a bright-eyed young woman just two years out of college. Joe and Marybeth had met Mrs. Hanson during back-to-school night and had been duly impressed and practically bowled over by her obvious enthusiasmfor her job and her passion for teaching. Since Lucy’s third-grade teacher had been a weary, bitter twenty-four-year warhorse in the system who was counting the days until her retirement,Mrs. Hanson was a breath of fresh mountain air. Over the past month, Lucy had participated in a canned-food drive for the disadvantaged in the county and on the reservation, and a candy sale with profits dedicated to Amazon rain forest restoration. Lucy couldn’t wait to go to school in the morning, and seemed to start most sentences with, “Mrs. Hanson says . . .”