Winterkill Page 18

  “Please excuse me for my stupidity,” Klein continued, “but I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying up there. Those of us not used to speaking in government rhetoric have a hard time following you.” More laughter rumbled through the room.

  Joe looked around quickly. All of the faces were turned to Herman Klein. Joe recognized more of the attendees than he had thought he would. Several of Klein’s fellow ranchers were scattered throughout. Outfitters who used the forest for hunting and packing trips were there in full force. Local hunters made up the rest of the crowd. In a hunting community like Saddlestring, that meant doctors, lawyers, retailers, and teachers. Spud Cargill and Rope Latham, the roofers, wore their company jackets with the logo of a winged T-Lock shingle on the backs. Joe remembered them from the First Alpine Church. But as far as he could tell, there were no Sovereigns in the room. He had wondered if any of them would attend.

  Melinda Strickland was falling into a trap that was being baited by Herman Klein. It was the “I’m just a poor dumb country boy” ruse that locals loved to spring on outsiders and especially government officials. Joe recognized the trap from experience.

  “My understanding is that just about half of all the land in the state of Wyoming is owned and managed by the federal government,” Klein said, “Whether it’s the Forest Service, or the BLM, or the Park Service, or whatever. In any case, half of our state is run by federal bureaucrats. Not that I have anything against federal bureaucrats, of course.”

  The crowd tittered and even Joe smiled. Melinda Strickland stood with her hands on her hips and her eyes cold. One of her employees started to sit down beside her and she shot him a withering look. He stood back up.

  “The problem I got with this,” Klein continued, “is that there is no accountability. If all this land was run by the state, or even local politicians, we could vote them out if we wanted to. If it was run by a corporation we could buy stock and go to board meetings and raise hell. But because it’s run by bureaucrats who nobody elected—all we can do is come to meetings like this to hear what you’re going to do to our forests and our countryside.” There were murmurs of assent.

  “Excuse me,” Melinda Strickland interrupted. “Excuse me. Our agency manages the resources on behalf of the public. We’re not dictators here, ya know.” She looked to the back of the room for approval. The two men standing next to Robey Hersig nodded to her.

  “That may be,” Herman Klein agreed, smiling. “But by saying you’re managing things on behalf of the public you’re basically saying that those of us here in this room who live here aren’t the public, because you sure as hell never asked us anything.”

  “That’s the purpose of this meeting!” Melinda Strickland countered, exasperated.

  “If that’s the case,” Klein asked, “why did you try to shut me up just a minute ago when I stood up?”

  “Because there needs to be order,” Strickland said, her face flushed. “We can’t do things based on mob rule.”

  Herman Klein feigned surprise. He slowly looked around the room. “This doesn’t look like a mob to me,” he said. “This looks like a group of concerned local citizens who came out on a cold-ass night to participate in a public meeting.”

  “Nailed her,” Hersig whispered. “He nailed her.”

  Joe nodded.

  “This,” Melinda Strickland said, her voice rising and her finger pointed at Herman Klein, “This is an example of the problem. I’ve had a district supervisor murdered and a hardworking BLM employee assaulted because of this kind of hateful attitude.”

  “Me?” Klein asked, genuinely hurt. “What in the hell did I do?”

  “You didn’t do anything, as far as I know,” she said. “But this kind of antigovernment attitude allows things like that to happen! It practically guarantees that things like that will happen!”

  Hersig turned his head and he and Joe exchanged glances. The air had been sucked out of the room. Melinda Strickland had, within a minute, successfully shamed the crowd.

  “What are you going to do about those Sovereigns?” someone asked.

  Melinda Strickland jumped at the chance to change the subject, and compound her momentum.

  “A plan is in place to evict the violators,” she said. “I’m not at liberty to explain the steps that are being taken, other than to say that a well-thought-out, strategic plan is in place that will end in the desired results.”

  Several people in the crowd clapped with approval. While they did, Herman Klein quietly sat back down.

  “Amazing,” Hersig whistled, as he gathered his coat to leave.

  As the crowd filed out, Melinda Strickland strode toward Joe in the back of the room. She approached him as if she couldn’t wait to shake his hand. The two men in the back joined them. She introduced them to Joe as Dick Munker and Tony Portenson of the FBI.

  “This is Joe Pickett,” she said to the two men. “He’s the game warden I was telling you about.”

  The gray-haired, skeletal man with the deep voice was Dick Munker. Munker offered Joe a business card.

  “Manager, Federal Bureau of Investigation Interagency Special Assignment Unit,” Joe read. “What does that mean?”

  “We defuse volatile situations.” Munker smiled with his mouth, his eyes fixed on Joe. “We’re here by special request.”

  “You two insulted my daughter, I believe,” Joe said. “She was the one who gave you directions to the Forest Service office.”

  Munker looked quickly away, but Portenson stared back at Joe with what looked like anxiety. He seemed to Joe to be wishing that there was not a confrontation with Munker.

  Melinda Strickland acted as if the exchange had not occurred. “They’re very familiar with quite a few of the Sovereigns,” she said. “That’s why I wanted them here. We want to prevent another Ruby Ridge, or Waco.”

  Joe nodded.

  “In Idaho they called it ‘Weaver Fever,’ ” Munker added, taking Strickland’s cue, his voice dropping an octave so he couldn’t possibly be overheard by the departing crowd. “It’s when the community and the press get whipped up into a fury by a standoff situation and things get ugly. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “I thought it was the FBI who got ugly at Ruby Ridge.” Joe said.

  Munker set his jaw and his eyes bored holes into Joe. “You thought wrong,” he said. He shot a look at Melinda Strickland. “Which side is he on, anyway?”

  “Geez, I wished I could get away with wearing a hat like that,” Tony Portenson interjected, clearly attempting to change the direction of the conversation. He nodded toward Joe’s well-worn Stetson. “But I’m from Jersey, and everybody would know I was faking it.”

  “I know who you are,” Munker said, stifling a smile. Portenson’s joke hadn’t diverted him. “You’re the one who had Lamar Gardiner in custody when he escaped. The game warden, right?”

  Joe felt a pang of anger and embarrassment.

  “Joe,” Strickland said, placing her hand on Joe’s shoulder, “Mr. Munker and Mr. Portenson are experts in the kind of situation we have here in Twelve Sleep County. They’re in demand all over the west. They’re here to advise us on how we should proceed with the Sovereigns. They’ll be working here, but also in Idaho and Nevada.”

  “Other hotbeds of insurrection,” Munker added. “Where federal officials have been hurt or threatened.”

  Strickland opened her purse so Joe would look inside. “They advised me to get this to protect myself.” He could see the checkered grip of a stainless-steel nine-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic pistol. “I still can’t believe I’m actually carrying a gun around with me.” Her half-giggling voice belied her words of concern, though, Joe thought.

  Joe took his hat off and rubbed his eyes. Melinda Strickland with a gun.

  He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “I think saying this is a hotbed of insurrection is pretty strong,” Joe cautioned. “I live here and I just don’t see it. I’m no
t saying there aren’t some real independent characters around, or some hotheads. But I just don’t see that it could be organized like you seem to be suggesting.”

  Tony Portenson and Dick Munker exchanged glances.

  “How familiar are you with the extremists up there in that compound?” Munker asked. “Do you know what kind of people they are? What they believe? We know them, and their type. Some of those individuals have been involved in some of the worst situations that have taken place in this country in the past dozen years. You’ve got ex-cons, and conspirators, and scumbags who just haven’t been caught at anything yet. These scumbags have gotten this far because they’ve been tolerated and coddled. They need to know that not everybody will take their crap.”

  Joe stared at Munker in disbelief. He felt another hard twist in his stomach as he listened.

  “Ms. Strickland has given us carte blanche to deal with the situation,” Portenson said, grinning. “For once, we can deal with these assholes the right way.”

  Melinda Strickland returned his grin. She clearly liked being admired by colleagues. It made Joe slightly sick. “Sheriff Barnum is completely on board with this,” she told Joe. “He’s volunteered his complete cooperation.”

  “I met Wade Brockius,” Joe confessed. “He told me they just want to be left alone. That they mean no harm.”

  “And you believed him?” Munker asked, cocking his eyebrow.

  “I don’t have any reason not to,” Joe said.

  “How about a dead Forest Service supervisor? How about a BLM employee left for dead?”

  Joe felt a slow rise of anger. “Unless there’s something you boys can tell me, I can’t see the connection between those crimes and the Sovereigns. Nate Romanowski is already in jail for the Gardiner murder. Are you saying Romanowski is connected to the Sovereigns?”

  “Maybe Romanowski scouted the mountains for them,” Portenson said, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe Romanowski found that campground for them and called his buddies to come join him here in Lost Bumfuck, Wyoming.”

  Joe turned on Portenson with a withering stare. “Do you have a single shred of proof that what you say is valid?” Joe asked. “You sound like you’re making this up as you go along.”

  “What about your little girl?” Munker asked. “Didn’t one of them take her?”

  Joe didn’t reply. He couldn’t believe April had been brought up. The wound was still too fresh.

  “Maybe if you help us out, it will help you get her back sooner.”

  “How?”

  Munker started to speak, then caught himself. A wry smile formed. “At least then we’ll know whose side you’re on.”

  Joe fought the urge to smash Munker’s face with his fist. Instead, Joe fitted his hat back on and walked away.

  Joe was sitting in his truck waiting for it to warm up when Elle Broxton-Howard appeared in his headlights and approached the passenger-side window. She knocked on the glass, and Joe gestured for her to come in. She climbed into the truck and shut the door.

  “The heater isn’t hot yet,” he apologized. “It’ll take a minute to get going.”

  “It’s so cold here,” she said, shivering. She was huddled in her dark wool coat. “I don’t know how you people can stand it out here.”

  “Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Joe said, making conversation.

  “Melinda was magnificent in there, wasn’t she?” Broxton-Howard said, sounding awestruck.

  Joe grunted—not a yes, not a no. He was still seething from his encounter with Munker.

  As the cab warmed, Joe could smell her scent. The far-off light from the fluorescent pole lamp profiled her against the window. She was lovely.

  Suddenly, Elle leaned across the seat toward him. “I’m starting to think you’re the key to my story.”

  “What?” Joe asked, confused. “I thought you were writing about Melinda Strickland.”

  “Well . . . it’s about her. But you seem to be a pivotal character in all of this.” She stared deeply into his eyes as she spoke. Her eyes glistened. Her lips were parted ever-so-slightly. Her scent seemed even stronger now, somehow. It both troubled and excited him.

  “I heard that you’ve shot three men? That you wounded two men three years ago and that you killed a man last year at a canyon called Savage Run?”

  Joe broke off their gaze and stared out the windshield.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Oh . . . people around town.”

  He felt his throat constrict, and tried to recover.

  “We need to talk . . . soon,” she said. “How about dinner?”

  She smiled. Her teeth were white and perfect.

  “Sure,” Joe said, pausing. “At my house. With my wife Marybeth and the kids.”

  The light went out of her eyes, and although the smile remained it decreased in wattage. She assessed him coolly.

  “I guess that would work,” she said, businesslike. “Although I was kind of thinking of something more . . .” The sentence trailed off into nowhere. He didn’t prompt her to continue.

  “I’ll give you a call,” she said, withdrawing and opening her door. “Your number’s in the wonderful little half-inch-thick Saddlestring telephone book, I presume?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you have a fax machine?” she asked suddenly, half-in and half-out.

  He told her the number.

  “I’ll fax over the list of things I can’t eat,” she said, and was gone.

  Driving home, he tried to put the evening into some kind of perspective. He failed. All he could foresee, as he thought about it, was inevitable tragedy. Dick Munker troubled him. The man exuded a smug, chip-on-the-shoulder fanaticism, and he had Melinda Strickland’s ear. Munker didn’t seem like the kind of person who could defuse a situation, as he claimed, but the kind who would ignite one. The kind of guy who would spray a campfire with gasoline. Munker, and Portenson, seemed disdainful of the Sovereigns, the community, and Joe himself. They seemed to revel in being insiders with guns, specialists finally given a green light to do what they saw fit. Munker, Joe thought, was the kind of guy who would kill somebody and later claim it was for the victim’s own good.

  He opened his window and let a knife-edge of icy air cut into his face. Maybe, he hoped, it would sweep the scent of Elle Broxton-Howard’s perfume from the cab of the pickup.

  Joe felt like his head was caught in a vise. And every day, someone applied another half-turn.

  Missy was awake in the dark, watching television on the couch when Joe got home. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw things more clearly. There was an empty wine bottle on its side near the foot of the couch, and a half-full bottle gripped in her other hand. Her face was shiny with tears.

  “Are you okay?” Joe asked tentatively.

  She raised her head, and her unfocused eyes settled somewhere to the left of his nose. She was very drunk.

  “Okay?” she asked. “I’m just fucking wonderful.”

  He regretted that he had asked.

  “It’s my BIRTHday,” she slurred. “I’m sixty-three. Sixty-three goddamned years old without a house, without a husband, without even a boyfriend for the first time in my life.”

  Yes, you’re old, Joe thought, old enough not to act like this. He began to mount the stairs.

  “It’s been a long night,” he said, hoping she would stop.

  “Stuck here in the middle of nowhere-land, getting older by the minute, and missing my granddaughter April.” She sipped from her glass and a bead of red wine ran down her chin. “Even though she’s not really my granddaughter.”

  Joe stopped and turned. “That’s right,” he snapped. “Even though she’s not ‘really’ your granddaughter. How generous of you. I can tell you’re pretty busted up about it. You’re so upset, you even opened a bottle of wine.”

  Missy’s face fell. “I can’t believe you said that to me,” she said, tears glistening in her eyes.

  “Sorry,” Joe said, his voice unsym
pathetic. “Happy Birthday.” He turned and resumed climbing the stairs.

  “Ah, you don’t really care,” Missy said behind him. “You know, Joe Pickett, if you weren’t my son-in-law, I’d say you were a very self-absorbed man.”

  Joe hesitated again on the stairs, thought better of it, and proceeded. He heard the clink of the wineglass against her perfect, six-thousand-dollar teeth.

  Although the bedroom was dark, Marybeth was awake.

  “Joe, were you arguing with my mother?”

  Joe stood still, trying to tamp down his anger from a moment before. Instead, something he had been bottling up gushed out.

  “Is she going to live with us?” he asked. “Is she going to stay here?”

  Marybeth turned on her bedside lamp. “Joe, she’s going through a tough time. I can’t believe you’re acting this way.”

  Joe couldn’t quit. “She’s going through a tough time? Look at us, Marybeth. All she has to do is snag another husband and she’s home free. We’ve got the situation with April, and lunatics are running everything . . . I’ve got a guy who somehow expects me to save his life, and I’m pretty sure there’s a murderer out there running loose . . .”

  “Joe, lower your voice,” Marybeth said sternly.

  “ . . . and I’ve got a mother-in-law downstairs feeling sorry for herself.”

  “JOE.”

  He stopped and caught himself.

  “I don’t need you to remind me what’s going on.” Marybeth’s eyes flashed. “What do you want me to do, throw her out into the snow? All day long I’ve been trying to blot out this . . . ‘situation’ . . . with April and do something constructive. And you lose your temper and bring it all back.”

  Joe looked at her, noticed the tears forming in her eyes. But he was still too angry to apologize.

  In a silence that was deafening, Joe got ready for bed and climbed in. She switched off the lamp, turned her back to him and he thought she was pretending to sleep. He touched her shoulder but she didn’t respond.

  You’re right, he wanted to tell her now, I’m sorry.

  Joe rolled back over and stared at the ceiling and listened to the icy wind outside rattle the window.