Out of Range (24 page)

It was above the drainage, while he was still hidden in the timber, when he looked down and saw a man doing something he shouldn’t be doing.

At first, Joe couldn’t figure out what he was seeing. He had dismounted and tied up his horses out of sight in a thick stand of aspen, and was watching the man in the meadow through his binoculars. His digital camera with the zoom lens was at the foot of the boulder he peered over.

The man was over five hundred yards away, moving around in a pocket clearing on the other side of Clear Creek. He was walking around in a circle, stopping at intervals to kick at the ground. There was something long and thin on his shoulder—a rifle, maybe. No, Joe saw as he focused in, it was a shovel. The man was big and lumbering, but he moved gracefully. His back was to Joe and he had yet to turn and show his face. As the man continued his circle and moved into shadow, Joe swung his binoculars toward the trees on the side of the clearing. Three sorrel horses stood motionless by the trunks of pine trees. One horse was saddled, the other two carried panniers that appeared to be empty. Joe surmised that the man had packed something up the drainage in the panniers and buried his cargo in the clearing.

Then the man stepped from the shadows into the sun, removed his hat and wiped his brow with his sleeve. Joe focused his binoculars on the face of Smoke Van Horn.

Smoke was wearing a flannel shirt, a fleece vest, jeans, and a gun belt with a longbarreled revolver. He looked up and down the drainage, then swung his eyes to the trees where Joe was hiding. Joe slunk down behind the boulder so Smoke wouldn’t see the glint of his lenses and unpacked his camera. He wondered if Smoke felt he was being watched, knowing how prescient that feeling could be.

Rising again, Joe took five quick shots of Smoke as he took a last look at the sky, turned with his shovel, and lumbered back toward his horses. Joe gave Smoke twenty minutes to ride away before he emerged from behind the rock.

...

The clearing was trampled down not only by Smoke’s boots, but by what looked like hundreds of elk tracks. Elk pellets as fresh as the night before stood in clumps throughout the grass.

Joe photographed the clearing, the tracks, and the nine fresh mounds of dirt in a sloppy circle in the clearing. He knew what he would find when he kicked the dirt clear on the mounds, and he found it: fiftypound salt blocks. Violators had learned in the past few years not to place the salt aboveground, where it was obvious from a distance. If they buried it out of view with a thin cover of loose dirt, the elk would find it easily but the blocks would be almost impossible to spot without literally being on top of them.

The toughest thing about arresting an outfitter who was baiting elk with salt was catching him doing it. The outfitter could always claim that it wasn’t he who placed the blocks out. Even if the outfitter was caught with salt blocks in his panniers, he could claim they were for his horses. No, in order to arrest someone for illegal salting, or what the regulations called “hunting near an attractant,” he would literally have to be caught in the act of putting the salt down. Just to be sure he’d gotten it all, Joe reviewed the photos on the screen display on the back of his camera.

They were long shots, several not in sharp focus. But there was no doubt that the man with the shovel was Smoke, and what he was burying were salt blocks. Although Joe had blundered into the situation by taking a wrong trail, Smoke had been caught redhanded.

Will Jensen had suspected Smoke of salting for four years, but could never nail him for it.

“Now you can really rest in peace,” Joe said aloud.

He looked at his wristwatch, then at the sky. There were three hours of daylight left, and he figured it would take two to get to the state cabin. Smoke’s arrest in his elk camp would need to wait until tomorrow.

The state cabin was older, smaller, and more beatup than Joe had imagined it would be. The setting was nice, though, and the cabin had a small front porch that looked out over a meadow and a small lake that had been named, without much imagination, State Lake.

In the last half hour of dusk, he corralled the horses, dragged the panniers into the oneroom cabin, unshuttered the two cracked windows, and got a fire going in the ancient woodstove. He worked quickly, his goal to enjoy a light bourbon on the front porch as the sun set. He was delayed when he had to sweep mouse excrement off the floor and counter, and clear a bird’s nest from the top of the chimney pipe. By the time he poured warm bourbon from his flask into his metal camp cup, the sun had sunk into State Lake.

While steak sizzled and potatoes fried in castiron skillets, Joe sipped and took measure of the cabin. The logs it had been built with were grayed and cracking with age, and they needed rechinking. Rusted spikes driven into the logs served as coat and equipment hangers. A calendar from 1963

had never been replaced. The bed was an old metalframed single, with a thin mattress, gray with age and dirt. He flipped through a puckered journal that listed the cabin’s visitors and occupants for the last twenty years. He recognized the names of game wardens and biologists, and saw where Trey Crump had signed in fifteen years before. The last page and a half of entries were all by Will Jensen. Joe was surprised to see that the last entry by Will was made just three weeks before.

Somehow, in the sequence of events that led to Will’s death, he had missed the fact that the ex–game warden had used the state cabin. In fact, he had been up there for the week preceding his death.

Joe looked at the last signature. Although it looked like Will’s writing—Joe had seen so much of Will’s cribbed style that he felt he was an expert on it—the name was written in a shaky, uncertain hand. There were loops in the letters where there normally weren’t loops, and the pen had crossed over the lines. And something else, something so tiny that Joe had to lift the journal to the propane lamp to see it. At first, he thought that Will, for some reason, had jotted a period after his name, as if making some kind of statement. But it wasn’t a punctuation mark, it was a single, tiny letter: “S.” He recognized the scrawl from the invitation he had held in his hand two days before.

Joe lowered the journal. Stella had come up here with him? How dare she? How dare he? Despite himself, he looked over his shoulder at the bed and imagined her in it.

He was jealous of Will, and ashamed of himself.

Then something occurred to him, and he quickly walked across the cabin and flipped up the old mattress. There it was: Will’s last notebook.

And something else. A nicker of a horse outside the cabin, followed by a deep, throatclearing cough.

“Hey, FNG! Something smells mighty good in there!

And I brung along a bottle!”

Joe’s stomach clutched and his mouth went dry as he recognized Smoke’s voice. He tossed the notebook back under the mattress and turned toward the door, noting that his shotgun was within quick reach in the corner. He wondered if Smoke had seen him coming down from Clear Creek and was there now to make sure Joe wouldn’t be able to ever tell anyone.

Twenty Seven

Sheridan had overheard the plan her mother and Nate made regarding the 720 phone calls to their house. Despite the fact that it seemed like a good plan, she wasn’t very happy about it. In fact, she wasn’t very happy about anything at the moment.

For the third time that week, Nate was eating dinner with them. Sheridan noticed the first night that her mother had used the nice plates from the pantry, the ones they usually used only on holidays or when they had special company. The playful way her mother and Nate talked with each other, adulttoadult, bothered her. And she noticed— boy did she notice—how attentive her mother was when it came to Nate, asking questions and saying things like: “Would you like some more? I seem to have made too much,” and, “I’ve never seen anyone enjoy my cooking so much.”

Maybe, Sheridan thought, if her mom cooked like that when her dad was home, and used the nice plates, her dad would enjoy it as much. When she had told her mother that earlier, before Nate arrived, she received a withering look.

Sheridan had first noticed the friendship between Nate and her mother the year before and at the time couldn’t process what bothered her about it so much. Now she knew. Her mother was mildly flirting, and Nate didn’t mind. Because of her feelings for them both, and for her father, Sheridan’s only way of dealing with it at the time, and now, was to be angry with her mother, to create disorder. This was becoming easier to do all the time.

“Nate is here to help us,” her mother had said. “The least we can do is give him dinner.”

“He hasn’t had time for a falconry lesson for two weeks,” Sheridan countered, “but he sure has time to come over here.”

Sheridan couldn’t believe what she felt—jealous of her own mother. But there was more to it than that. What about her dad?

Lucy was oblivious to it all, which also angered Sheridan. Her sister made things worse by asking, “Is Nate coming over tonight?”

After dinner, Nate and her mother waited for a call from 720, and Sheridan thought it was a pretense. Nate didn’t need to sit in the living room after dinner drinking coffee for his plan to work.

Nate had found out that area code 720 was from Denver. When her mother said they didn’t know anyone in Denver, Nate replied that he didn’t think the calls were coming from there.

“I’m pretty sure it’s the number from a calling card,” Nate said. “The company that distributes it is based in Aurora, Colorado, which is a suburb of Denver. I think the calls are being made locally by someone disguising his identity by using a thirdparty number. I have an idea where the calls might be coming from, but I can’t prove anything unless I catch him in the act.”

“What do you want me to do?” her mother had asked. “Next time he calls, keep him on the line. Don’t hang up on him. Talk to him instead, ask him questions. I think that’s what he wants, to get you upset. But while you’ve got him on the line, call me immediately on your cell phone so I know we’ve got him live and I’ll know if he hangs up or not. That way, I can check out my theory.”

“Where do you think he’s calling from?”

Nate shrugged. “Didn’t you say you can hear some background noises sometimes? People talking, even some music?”

“Yes.”

“There are only a few public places open that late at night,” Nate said. “So I’m thinking it’s a bar or a restaurant.”

“I see. Who do you think it is?”

“It’s just a guess,” Nate said. “I don’t want to say anything until I confirm it.”

“Just make him stop,” her mom said. “Every time the phone rings I think it’s Joe. And I don’t want to miss Joe’s call because this idiot is on the line.”

Nate nodded, and sipped his coffee.

“Don’t hurt him, Nate.”

“Never,” Nate said, in a tone meant to be disbelieved.

When the phone rang an hour later and her mother said, “Seventwooh,” to Nate, he was out the door and in his Jeep before she picked up the receiver.

Sheridan watched as her mother opened her cell phone and speeddialed Nate’s number while asking, “Why do you keep calling me? Is there something you want? Why won’t you talk to me?”

Ten minutes later, Bud Barnum looked up in time to see the oldfashioned accordion doors crash in and a huge pair of hands reach into the phone booth and grab his collar.

“Hey!”

Nate Romanowski jerked the receiver from his hand and asked, “Marybeth?”

When he heard an answer, Romanowski let the phone drop and was on Barnum like an animal.

“Help me!” Barnum cried out to the patrons seated at stools at the Stockman’s Bar, but no one stepped forward.

Even Timberman, who had a sawedoff shotgun and a tapewrapped pool cue under the bar, froze where he stood.

Romanowski pulled the exsheriff close and spoke quietly from an inch away: “From now on, you will leave that family the fuck alone.”

Barnum tried to reply but found himself being violently pulled along, Romanowski’s hands still on his collar, aimed for the bar. A few drinkers had the presence of mind to grab their mugs and step away, but most didn’t, and when Romanowski launched him onto the bar facefirst and pulled him down the length of it, beer splashed into his mouth and whiskey stung his eyes.

Romanowski didn’t let go until he had wiped the bar clean with Barnum and sent him hurtling off the other end, where he crashed in a heap with a sound like wet laundry being thrown on the floor.

Barnum lay there, trying to get his breath back, wiping at the sting in his eyes, when he felt more than saw Romanowski lean over him, again inches away. He felt his lips pried open by thick, callused fingers, and he cried out sharply when pain shot through his mouth and his cupped tongue filled with hot blood.

He sagged sideways, not moving, and opened his eyes to see Romanowski toss cash on the bar and announce he was buying the house a round.

Romanowski pointed a finger at Timberman: “If you ever see Barnum head for the telephone booth again, warn him off. He likes to intimidate families. He uses a calling card so they can’t tell who’s harassing them.”

With that, Romanowski gave Barnum a look of icy contempt and walked out of the Stockman’s.

After they were sure he was gone, several of Barnum’s old friends helped him to his feet. They hadn’t helped when he needed it, he thought. They had frozen and watched. He tried to say, “Get your hands off me, you fuckers,” but his voice slurred and blood spattered from his mouth.

“Bud, you’ve got to get that thing out,” one of the men said, reaching toward Barnum’s mouth.

The exsheriff turned angrily away and reached up, feeling drops of blood spatter hot on his hand.

Tears filled his eyes as he pried the calling card out from between his front teeth, where Romanowski had shoved it up well into his gum. Removing the plastic card resulted in a fresh torrent of blood. His friends stepped away, even as Timberman approached with a bar rag.