Endangered Page 14

  “I just do what I’m told to do for the good of the family. It wasn’t nothing personal. Mom always says we gotta cover all the bases.”

  Those were the same words he’d used when she’d asked him the last time. The same words he used every time she asked.

  “‘Cover all the bases’? What does that even mean?”

  He shrugged again and said, “She’s always thinking a few steps ahead of everybody else. I don’t even try to outguess her on this kind of thing.”

  “Are you sure he’s dead?” she asked.

  That made him think. It was as if he’d never even considered the question.

  He said, “We hit him with three full loads of buckshot. That’d kill any man.”

  “Nate’s not any man. He’s a good man. And he was unarmed.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. Then: “Why was that? Why didn’t he have that famous gun of his on him?”

  “The feds took it away.”

  “Damned feds anyway,” he said. “That’s what they’re tryin’ to do with all of us—take away our guns. That’s what your president wants to do.”

  Liv said, “Why is he my president?”

  He reddened. “You know. Jeez, it seems like everything I say makes you mad.”

  “I’m in a hole.”

  “Could be worse,” he said.

  “What did you do with the van?”

  “We took care of it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s okay if you don’t eat it all,” he said, lowering the bucket to the floor. “I noticed you don’t eat everything I bring you. That’s probably why you’re so skinny.”

  She sighed.

  “Man, that chicken smells good, don’t it?” he said, nudging the black bucket with his boot tip. “I bet you can’t wait to dig into that.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Because that’s what my people eat?”

  “Shit, that ain’t what I meant,” he said, looking down for a second. “Me, I love fried chicken, and as you can see, I’m a white man. Mom makes it once a week, on Friday night, and I always make sure I’m around. It’s my favorite thing. I usually eat six or seven thighs.” He paused. Then: “I’m a thigh man. I love that dark meat.”

  “There you go again,” she said.

  When he looked up, this time he wasn’t embarrassed at all, and she realized he’d meant to say it. He’d probably been practicing it to himself on his walk over from the main house. He probably thought he was clever.

  “Oh,” she said, sickened by the realization, but trying not to show it. She refused to show him weakness.

  Above, Liv heard a door slam shut in the distance, then a woman shout.

  “Bull? What are you doing down there?”

  The man rolled his eyes and boomed, “No names, Cora Lee!”

  He looked at Liv and shook his head as if he expected her to agree with him what a dolt Cora Lee was.

  “Bull and Cora Lee,” Liv said. “So was that your mother I met at the ranch?”

  “Quit asking me all these damned questions,” Bull said, irritated. She couldn’t tell if he was angry at her or at Cora Lee. Or both.

  “Bull!” Cora Lee shouted. “We’re all fuckin’ waiting on you to eat! You’re supposed to lower that bucket down to her. You ain’t supposed to deliver it like you was fuckin’ room service.”

  “She’s got a mouth on her,” Bull said as an aside to Liv. “And she could probably afford to miss a few meals, if you know what I mean.”

  Liv forced herself to grin. She could tell he liked that.

  “Bull, goddamnit!” Cora Lee yelled.

  “I’m coming!” he yelled back. “I’m coming.”

  Before he climbed back up the ladder, he asked, “You need anything?” His tone was much gentler than the one he’d used to answer Cora Lee.

  “Yes. Let me out of here.”

  “Very funny,” he said with a chuckle.

  He climbed to the top. She heard Cora Lee say, “Jesus, man. There you are. Hurry the fuck up.”

  “Shut up, Cora Lee,” Bull said as he pulled the ladder up and swung the doors closed and locked them.

  —

  TWO HOURS LATER, the footfalls came back. Lighter this time, but not much.

  Instead of Bull, it was Cora Lee. Liv recognized her by her voice.

  “I’m doin’ the shit run,” Cora Lee said, dropping the coil of thin rope to the floor. It nearly hit Liv. “Tie it on your feed bucket first. Then I’ll drop it back down for the chamber pot.”

  While Liv bent down to fix the rope to the black bucket handle, Cora Lee said, “What is it you and Bull was talking about for so long?”

  “I wasn’t the one talking,” Liv said.

  “Goddamn that man,” Cora Lee said under her breath. “You just stay the hell away from him.”

  Liv looked up, exasperated. “I’m not the one coming down the ladder.”

  Cora Lee narrowed her eyes. She was a sturdy, rough-looking blonde. She looked like she’d lived hard. Liv could see where she had once been pretty, twenty years and fifty pounds ago. Now, though, she had a weathered face set in a scowl.

  “Tell them to let me go and I’ll never breathe a word of this to anyone,” Liv said.

  “Like I’m gonna believe that,” Cora Lee said, untying the feed bucket and setting it aside. She dropped the rope back down. “Now your shitter.”

  As Cora Lee hoisted the white bucket, it thumped on each rung of the ladder. Liv retreated to the far corner of the cellar before any of the contents could splash out and hit her. A few foul drops stained the floor near the feet of the ladder.

  “Oh, sorry,” Cora Lee said, not sorry at all.

  Liv heard Cora Lee empty the bucket on the ground a few steps away from the cellar door, then she returned to lower it back down.

  “Would you mind rinsing it out first?” Liv asked.

  “Yeah, I mind,” Cora Lee said. “I gotta get myself ready. Me and Bull are goin’ to town later.”

  Liv thought, His name again. Either Cora Lee was especially stupid or she knew Liv would never have the chance to identify them to anyone.

  So there were four of them at least, Liv thought to herself. Bull and his wife, Cora Lee. A man—the father?—called Eldon. She knew that name because she’d heard Cora Lee call to him a day ago. Eldon had responded with “No names!” and Liv could picture him pointing toward the root cellar in the distance. At other times, though, she could hear conversations between family members where they seemed to either have forgotten about her or didn’t think she could overhear. Or they just didn’t care, like Cora Lee.

  She’d heard a couple of references to someone named Dallas, but she’d not heard Dallas speak for himself. Either Dallas was away or he’d not left the house.

  Then there was the mother. The woman who “covered all the bases.” The woman who originally claimed she was Kitty Wells. Liv cursed herself for falling for that. Kitty Wells had been a country singer back in the fifties and sixties. Liv’s mother used to sing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” around the house, and she sang it better than Kitty Wells.

  Liv hummed,

  Too many times married men think they’re still single

  And that’s caused many a good girl to go wrong.

  Her head snapped up when she recalled the lyrics. Maybe, she thought, she had a weapon after all.

  She was still thinking it through later that night when she realized it had become remarkably colder in the cellar, and the outside seemed oddly hushed. Only when a few rivulets of precipitation trickled down the clay walls did she know it was snowing.

  14

  On Saturday afternoon, Joe Pickett rumbled his pickup slowly down the muddy two-track that cut through the sagebrush toward the site of what had once been Lek 64. Daisy sat in th
e passenger seat with her front paws on the dashboard. The four inches of heavy spring snow that had fallen the night before had mostly thawed, but the moisture released a panorama of scents that kept his dog’s attention.

  Clouds shrouded the summits of the Bighorns, parked there as if gathering strength before they loosened their grip and snow descended again. There was no spring in the Rockies, Joe knew. There was winter, summer, fall, and March-through-June, which was made up of various highlights of the other three.

  While he often worked weekends in the summer to check fishermen and -women and in the fall to check hunters, he tried to take weekends off during the winter and March-through-June. But the night before, he’d received an email from his director, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, with the subject line “CRISIS.” Most subject lines on LGD’s emails were versions of “CRISIS” or “EMERGENCY.” The body of the email was written in her particular style: all capital letters and no punctuation except “. . .” between thoughts. To Joe, her messages all came across like shouted rants. She wanted him to “GET OUT TO THE LOCATION OF LEK 64 . . . RECOVER ANY SURVIVORS OF THE SAGE GROUSE MASSACRE . . .”

  Apparently, the news of the slaughter had gone viral within the agency due to notices sent out from the Sage Grouse Task Force. LGD wanted to mitigate her report to the governor about the incident by saying that her man in the district, game warden Joe Pickett, had rescued the survivors.

  Joe had groaned. He knew there would be no survivors because it had been more than a week since he’d discovered the killing field. The few cripples he’d seen darting through the brush would have long ago been eaten by predators, because they lacked the protection of the concentric circle of birds. On their own, they were history. It was the brutal but natural circle of life and death in the wild.

  He knew LGD wouldn’t be satisfied until he assured her he’d returned to the scene and looked it over. Even then, he knew she wouldn’t be pleased with his report. She was a political animal and not a favorite of Governor Rulon, who had appointed her as a favor to his wife. There were rumors that LGD was positioning herself to run for governor once Rulon completed his second and final term. She was sensitive to anything that might cause her a public relations hit—especially from the feds and her environmental support groups. Being in charge of an agency that let dozens of potentially endangered sage grouse be decimated on her watch wouldn’t help her ambitions. Her email to Joe was carefully crafted outrage that she could later use as evidence of the immediate action she had taken. She even referred to the loss of Lek 64 as “SPECIES GENOCIDE.”

  LGD had not asked about April’s condition but, to be fair, Joe wasn’t sure she knew about what had happened.

  —

  IF HE HADN’T known the country intimately, Joe thought, he could have easily driven right through the site of Lek 64 without recognizing it. The snows had smoothed out the tire tracks through the sagebrush, and predators had cleaned up the remains of the dead sage grouse. There were no longer feathers scattered everywhere on the ground, although there were a few pinfeathers caught in the brush. It was almost as if the birds had never been there at all.

  This time, he let Daisy out. If there were any remaining grouse, she would find them. He let her work the brush, and he monitored her the way he did when they were bird-hunting. She flowed through the brush with her nose down and her tail straight up and wagging. For a minute, it appeared she had found something when her tail, like a supercharged metronome, suddenly picked up speed. Joe followed her, wondering how he’d catch a crippled grouse with his bare hands, where he’d store it for the ride down, and where he’d keep it.

  Those thoughts vanished when a cottontail rabbit shot from the brush with Daisy in pursuit.

  —

  BEFORE JOE had put on his uniform and left for the breaklands, Marybeth had a long talk with the doctors in Billings. There was no bad news, but there was no good news, either. It was a miserable state of limbo.

  The swelling on April’s brain had gone down slightly, but it was a difficult thing to test. It didn’t make Marybeth optimistic, but it confirmed that the hospital was doing all it could, she said.

  Whether their insurance would pay for it all was also undetermined, despite daily calls Marybeth made to their provider.

  Nate’s condition was a mystery. All they knew was that he probably hadn’t died. His wing of the ICU was locked down tight, per the orders of Special Agent Stan Dudley of the FBI. Dudley wouldn’t take Marybeth’s calls, and didn’t return them. Joe had tried with the same result, and a call to Coon in Cheyenne had resulted in no information because, Coon said, Dudley communicated only with Washington and he didn’t feel any obligation to let the locals in on Nate’s prognosis. Even Nurse Reckling confided that Nate’s condition was unknown to her and others she knew on staff. There had been more surgeries, but that’s all she knew.

  —

  MORE NAILS had been hammered into Tilden Cudmore’s coffin when it was learned by the sheriff’s department that he’d been charged ten years earlier in Illinois for aggravated sexual assault. The victim was found walking down a rural road, and she’d accused Cudmore of giving her a ride and then pulling over and assaulting her. Unfortunately, she died several days later in a car wreck, before she could provide testimony against him in court. Cudmore was in custody at the time of the accident. The case was dropped.

  Dulcie told Joe it showed a pattern that had eluded them until they learned of the Illinois charges. Long before he moved to Saddlestring, Cudmore had haunted the rural highways and picked up hitchhikers and women needing a ride. Once they were in his vehicle, he assaulted them and dumped them to fend for themselves. Dulcie said she’d asked Sheriff Reed to initiate an investigation to find out whether there were other victims of similar crimes throughout the state and region. Perhaps, she’d told Joe, Cudmore had been operating under their radar for years. His political causes and eccentricities, she thought, had masked his obsession.

  —

  BRENDA’S STORY about Dallas’s journey home could not be disproved. He’d been thrown from the bull in Houston on Saturday, March 8. Brenda said he’d stayed in Houston most of Sunday as his pain got worse, then hit the road and drove twenty-two straight hours to arrive late Monday night. He was recovering at home and had been there for two days, she claimed, when April was attacked by Tilden Cudmore.

  Unfortunately, Dulcie said, the Cateses could produce no credit card receipts for gasoline or food on Dallas’s long ride home. Dallas, like most rodeo cowboys, paid his entry fees in cash and was paid in cash when he won. He rarely used a credit card except for the rare plane ticket or rental car.

  No one had come forward to dispute any aspect of Brenda’s explanation, Dulcie said. Until there was evidence otherwise, that line of inquiry was dead.

  But Joe still had his doubts about Cudmore, and about Dallas.

  —

  AS HE TRAILED DAISY through the brush, he stopped and fixed his gaze on the southern horizon. He knew the Cates place was several miles in that direction. The bench he was parked on was flat, but a mile to the south it sloped down into a shallow valley. The BLM land abutted the twelve-acre Cates compound.

  He turned slowly and studied the contours of the high bench. There were places, he thought, where the road he’d arrived on might be seen from below due to the high folds of the terrain. The angle might just be such that a vehicle on the road could be glimpsed from below in the valley in visual snapshots.

  He called Daisy back and started his pickup and did a three-point turn, then slowly retraced his route.

  At three different places along the two-track there were drainages to the south where he could see the valley below. At two of those drainages, he could see the distant cluster of buildings that belonged to the Cateses.

  Joe stopped at the second swale, rolled his driver’s-side window down three-quarters of the way, and mounted his Redfield spotti
ng scope to the top of the glass. Because the Cates place was two miles away, he turned off the motor to stop the vibration through his cab so he could focus.

  There was no activity on the place. After all, he thought, it was Saturday. He scoped the main house, a double-wide trailer, a barn, and several outbuildings. In the opening of a metal building he could see the chrome snouts of two pump trucks Eldon used to pump out septic systems.

  As he watched, he saw the front door of the main house open and Cora Lee, Bull’s wife, come out. She walked across the yard through a couple of old shacks. Her body language was surly, Joe thought, but then it always was. When Joe had arrested Bull for game violations, Cora Lee had called Joe every name in the book. She had a mouth on her.

  Cora Lee stopped at what looked like a well, opened some doors, and tossed something down in it. A few minutes later, she pulled up a bucket and dumped it out near the opening. Then she threw the bucket back in, closed the doors, and returned to the house.

  Could someone at the Cates place possibly have seen the vehicle of the person or persons who’d wiped out Lek 64? After all, if he could see the compound from where he was, they could see him.

  Joe doubted it. Too much distance, and too quick of a look at a vehicle on the road.

  But it gave him a pretense to pay them a visit. Director LGD would even approve of it.

  Dulcie might be another story.

  —

  EVEN THOUGH the Cates compound was in plain view in the valley, it took twenty-five minutes for Joe to get there on ancient two-tracks that were barely roads at all. As the place got larger in his windshield and he bounced his tires over ruts and knee-high sagebrush, he thought that the family employed the same kind of defense sage grouse did: they hid in plain sight. The tough part wasn’t finding them. The tough part was getting there.

  And it would be impossible to sneak up on them.

  He circumnavigated the fence line that defined the Cates property from BLM land and passed under a hand-lettered sign that read:

  DULL KNIFE OUTFITTERS

  C&C SEWER AND SEPTIC TANK SERVICE