Winterkill Read online

  “We have children here,” Brockius said.

  “Then you might want to reconsider your position,” Munker had said. The contempt in his voice was palpable. “If you do reconsider, call me personally. That’s why we kept your telephone line up. Just dial nine-one-one and the dispatcher will track me down day or night. Otherwise, I’ll be back in the morning with the court order for Spud Cargill.”

  “I told you he’s not here.”

  One by one, the vehicles backed up from the line and began to leave. The last remaining car was a dark SUV containing Dick Munker and a driver.

  Jeannie knew what was happening. The good people of Saddlestring, along with the Feds, were trying to kick them out. Just like they had kicked her out before. To do so, they were going to make things as miserable as possible.

  Her mouth curled into a snarl. Fuck them, she hissed.

  After Munker and the trucks left, it took hours for April to calm down. She asked why they hadn’t given the men in the trucks what they wanted.

  Clem told April to shut up, and Jeannie backhanded him across the mouth. Clem glared at Jeannie, then went outside for a while. When he came back, he was half-drunk and docile, and April was finally sleeping.

  Late that night, from inside a heavy black box under the base of a tree near Battle Mountain, there was a dull click. The click was so faint that it could not have been heard beyond a few feet away. Through the snow, two amber lights now glowed, and a digital tape began to spin. Heavy, double-insulated electrical wires crawled up from the box through the snow and were stapled fast on the trunk of the tree. A hundred feet away and twenty-four feet in the air, the two speakers crackled to life. The mountain silence yielded to a swinging back beat, tinny horns, and a young Wayne Newton singing:

  Danke schoen, darling,

  Danke schoen,

  Thank you for walks down Lover’s Lane . . .

  Inside one of the ice-encrusted trailers within the compound, Jeannie Keeley sat bolt upright in her bed. She listened, and realized that the song was not part of her dream. She looked through the gloom toward the rear of the trailer where April slept. April’s bed was of a thin fold-down design made of plywood veneer. When the girl tossed or turned, the bed creaked. It was creaking now.

  The song finally ended. Within a few seconds, it started up again. The same song, “Danke Schoen,” by Wayne Newton. This time the song was slightly louder than before. Clem, sleeping next to Jeannie on the double bed that they built each night by fitting the tabletop between the trailer’s two bench seats, had not stirred. As the music increased in volume, April began to cry.

  Jeannie was enraged. This was the first night that April had gone to sleep without crying. Since April had been back with her, Jeannie thought, there were lots of signs that she’d turned back into a baby. She had obviously been coddled. The girl cried about everything. April seemed to think that life was supposed to be easy, not tough. Jeannie knew better. April would learn. She would toughen up. She would have to, or else.

  Jeannie had just about had it with the girl. There’d been times in the last few days when she wanted to drive April back to the Picketts’ house and toss her out the door. It annoyed Jeannie to no end that April referred to the Pickett girls, Sheridan and Lucy, as her “sisters.” Jeannie had even rehearsed a “Here, you can have her back” speech in her mind.

  But when April slept, she was lovely. When April slept, Jeannie felt some of her motherly feelings come back. When April slept, the girl’s face relaxed and gentled and looked like a photo Jeannie had seen of herself when she was nine. Which reminded Jeannie that April was hers. Now, though, there was this horrible music, music that was almost pleasant at first but that now was otherworldly, awful, and gruesomely out of place.

  “Why do they keep playing that song over and over again?” April asked from her bed. Her voice was tiny and rough from crying.

  “ ’Cause they’re trying to get rid of us, honey,” Jeannie answered.

  Danke schoen, auf wiedersehen,

  Danke schoen . . .

  The song started up again, as soon as it was over. Jeannie had heard it six times now. Again, it was louder. The bass beat reverberated through the metal frame of the trailer, sounding to Jeannie like the devil’s own heartbeat.

  “Why do they keep playing it again and again? Can you make them stop?” April said.

  Another sound emerged, layered beneath the snappy tune of “Danke Schoen.” The first hints of it were distant: A knife being honed on a sharpening steel. There was a slight pop and the sound of tearing, like fabric being ripped, accompanied by a high-pitched, otherworldly squeal that set Jeannie’s teeth on edge. April cried harder, her body shaking. The squealing was now ear-piercing. It began to overwhelm the Wayne Newton song.

  “You know what that is?” Clem said, now awake. “That’s a rabbit being skinned alive.”

  Jeannie didn’t ask him how he knew that.

  Finally, it stopped. The rabbit panted shallowly, then died with a death rattle.

  April was now shaking, her hands covering her ears, her eyes closed tight.

  Then the brassy music started up again, louder. Then the background sound of the knife being sharpened.

  Danke schoen, darling

  Danke schoen,

  Thank you for walks down Lover’s Lane . . .

  PART THREE

  Whiteout

  Twenty-five

  The telephone next to the bed burred at 5:05 A.M. and Joe picked it up on the first ring. It was County Attorney Robey Hersig.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “It’s okay,” Joe said. “I’ve been awake most of the night.” Marybeth had slept poorly again, tossing and turning and pining for April. Joe had tried to calm her, with partial success. After she went back to sleep, he replayed in his head the conversation he’d had with Nate Romanowski, playing “What if?” What if, he wondered, he told Romanowski he needed his help? What if he turned Romanowski loose?

  “Joe, did anybody notify you about a meeting this morning at the Forest Service office?”

  “Nope.”

  “I didn’t think so. Anyway, Melinda Strickland and Sheriff Barnum have called a meeting for seven-thirty. All county law-enforcement personnel have been ordered to be there. They’ve requested that all state personnel be there as well, so I assume that means the state troopers and you.”

  Joe closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “What’s going on?”

  “Hell has broken loose.”

  The coffee in his road cup tasted bitter and metallic as he drove toward Saddlestring. It was unusually dark out for seven, and it took him a moment to see that the cloud cover was so dense and far-reaching that it blocked out the rising sun. It was as if a sooty lid had been placed over the valley. The only gap in the lid was a razor-thin band of orange that paralleled the eastern sagebrush plains. That band was the only hard evidence that it was daylight.

  Joe knew that a big storm was coming.

  He remembered the feeling he’d had in the wooded bowl before hearing Lamar Gardiner’s gunshots. It was the feeling of artillery being moved into place prior to a barrage. He felt it again—only this time, it was worse.

  Joe was shocked at the number of law-enforcement vehicles parked around the Forest Service office off Main Street. He parked half a block away and approached the building on a buckling concrete sidewalk. The air was still but seemed supercharged with rising humidity and low pressure. It was still unusually dark out, and Joe recalled the otherworldly half-light created by a solar eclipse the previous summer. He looked at his watch and saw that he was right on time for the meeting.

  The reception and conference area had been completely transformed since his visit on New Year’s Eve. The standard-issue government desks had been turned and shoved against the walls to create more space. Deputies, town police officers, and state troopers milled in the open area drinking coffee. Joe had never seen so many big guts straining against uniform shirt fabric in one p
lace at one time. Although there was little talking this early in the morning, he heard the clump of heavy boots and the creak of leather from holsters and Sam Browne belts. Deputies McLanahan and Reed were missing from the room, and Joe guessed they were still on roadblock duty. He scanned the room for Robey Hersig and found him near the back to the side of the coffee urn.

  “Thanks for calling,” Joe said to Hersig. “I think.”

  Hersig looked anxious. “Joe, did you get a fax this morning?”

  Joe said that the last fax he’d received from anybody was a list of food items that Elle Broxton-Howard didn’t want to eat.

  “You’re one of the few, then.” Hersig reached inside his blazer and handed Joe a folded sheaf of documents. The cover page of the fax was addressed to Robey, and the letterhead showed that it was from the Sovereign Citizens of the Rocky Mountains. After the cover was page after page of dense legalese. Statutes were cited throughout, including the Uniform Commercial Code. Joe was puzzled, and glanced up to Hersig.

  “What is this?”

  Hersig smiled sourly. “Two things, actually. The first is a subpoena to appear before their court to defend against the charge of impersonating a public official. The second is a lien against the county courthouse, the sheriff’s office, and my home for $27.3 million dollars.”

  “What?”

  Hersig nodded, and swallowed dryly. “Subpoenas and liens were faxed all over the place during the middle of last night.” He held his hand out—Joe noticed it was shaking slightly—and started counting off with his fingers. “The mayor, the town council, the county commissioners, the chief of police, the BLM director, Melinda Strickland, the governor of Wyoming . . .”

  “Governor Budd got one?”

  Hersig nodded and continued. “The Interior Secretary of the United States, the national Forest Service director, the director of the FBI, and I don’t know who all else got them nationally. Those are just the phone calls we’ve received this morning. That’s just the East Coast, which is two hours ahead of us. We don’t know how many people in the West will call.”

  “What prompted this?” Joe had never seen Hersig so shaky.

  Hersig’s eyes narrowed. Joe thought Hersig was about to spit a name out when the likely bearer of the name walked into the room.

  Melinda Strickland wore her Forest Service uniform, and her cocker spaniel trailed behind her on a leash. She strode purposefully to the front of the room and stationed herself behind a podium. Sheriff Barnum flanked her on one side, Dick Munker on the other. Munker sucked on a cigarette with the same intensity as an asthma victim using an inhaler.

  “Thank you all so much for coming,” Melinda Strickland said, her manner incongruously pleasant. Joe noted that her hair was a mousy brown color once again. “As you know, a situation developed yesterday that compounded during the night. I see Game Warden Joe Pickett in the back there—he somehow learned about this meeting—and we all have our friend Joe to thank for bringing at least one of the murderers to justice!”

  Joe wished he could worm himself through the back wall, as officers, deputies, and troopers all turned and looked at him. His fellow state employees—the troopers—clapped sharply, but they were the only ones. Joe knew that the others, especially the deputies, probably felt they’d been shown up. His intuition was confirmed when he noticed how Barnum was glowering at him from the front of the room. Someday, Joe thought, he and I will need to have it out. There are scores to settle.

  “The important thing . . .” Strickland shouted over nonexistent applause, as if trying to bring the silent room to heel, “The important thing is that we’ve been anticipating this situation for quite some time and we have everything completely and totally and awesomely under control. So now I’d like to turn the briefing over to Dick Munker of the FBI, who is heading up the operation on my behalf.”

  Munker extinguished his cigarette and turned to the podium, but Strickland thought of something and remained. She raised a thick stack of papers in the air and waved them. Joe recognized them as similar to what Hersig had showed him.

  “I don’t know how many of you got these during the night, but now you know the kind of twisted people we are dealing with here, ya know!”

  Munker lit another cigarette and gave her a moment to leave the podium. When she did, he surveyed the room with amusement in his eyes before stepping forward. He wore a gray sweater over a black turtleneck, and a shoulder holster. A two-way radio was hanging in a case on his belt.

  Munker began by nodding toward Joe. “A federal official is murdered while in his custody. The reason he gets murdered is because he manages to escape under the nose of our game warden here. Then our game warden, with a steering wheel handcuffed to his wrist, chases the escapee through the snow only to find him pinned to a tree by arrows.” His tone was accusatory, his eyes cold and mocking. “This is the man who is now our little hero. Well done, Game Warden.”

  Joe felt as if he’d been slapped. Even the deputies who had withheld applause seemed surprised by Munker’s nastiness, and they didn’t turn around to further embarrass Joe. Only Barnum stared and smirked.

  After a long, leisurely drag that allowed his comments to hang in the air even longer, Munker cocked his head to change the subject. “Gentlemen, we are at war, and this is now a war room.” Portenson wheeled a large chalkboard into the room. On it was a large-scale diagram of the Sovereign Citizen compound in relation to the two roads that approached it.

  “We’ve had entrance and exit roads blocked,” Munker said, pointing at red X’s on the map. “The only way out, or in, is via those roads or over the snow to nowhere. As soon as this meeting is over, the roadblocks will be manned again. The compound is currently quiet after a full night of audio Psy-Ops—psychological operations. We’re waiting on a warrant being signed by the judge, and when we have it we can apply even more pressure. Unfortunately, the judge received one of those documents Ms. Strickland showed you earlier and he’s a little shaken right now.”

  Munker smirked, and inhaled.

  “These liens and subpoenas are old fucking news, gentlemen. The Montana Freemen invented the trick back in 1995. Those losers found out they could paralyze the local community and all of the goddamned ‘officials’ in the State of Montana by sending those things out. Nothing makes a politician crap his shorts faster than a threat of legal action. As some of you know, there are some dregs of the Freemen up there in that compound now, so they know how the scheme works.”

  Joe barely heard what Munker was saying. He was still stinging from the unprovoked attack that started the meeting. It seemed to have come from nowhere. Joe knew that it was calculated. Calculated to do exactly what, he wasn’t sure. But it hurt.

  When he glanced up, he realized that Elle Broxton-Howard was standing next to him. She looked at him with a mixture of false affection and pity. He hated that.

  “ . . . Sheriff, what can you tell us about Spud Cargill?” Munker asked, turning his head toward Barnum.

  “Spud Cargill was thought to have been seen yesterday afternoon in a stolen vehicle driving like a bat out of hell up Battle Mountain Road,” Barnum said, passing out copies of Cargill’s photograph. Joe took one as the stack went by. It was a Saddlestring Roundup photo from two years ago, when Cargill caught a five-and-a-half-pound rainbow trout to win an ice-fishing tournament in Saratoga, Wyoming. “He was seen going up, and blew right through the roadblock, but he wasn’t seen coming down. It’s possible he came down between the shift change, but we have no information on that. There’s too many old Forest Service roads up there to keep watch on all of them, but we’ve tightened up the security on the main roads as of today. Our assumption is that he is in the Sovereign compound, and the Sovereigns are harboring him. Last night, as many of you know, they refused to turn him over or even let us look for him. This leads us to believe that Cargill may have been in cahoots with them since the beginning.”

  “There’s a leap of logic,” Joe whispered to Hersig. Hersi
g pretended he hadn’t heard.

  “Cargill’s partner, Rope Latham, is currently in custody. He’s confessed to assisting Cargill with the murder as well as setting up the BLM employee.”

  “Has he confessed to being in cahoots with the Sovereigns?” Joe whispered, again for Hersig’s benefit.

  Hersig shot him an angry look that surprised Joe. Apparently, Hersig was more troubled by the lien and subpoena than Joe had realized. Hersig was dead serious this morning.

  “What about the press?” Munker asked rhetorically, nodding toward Melinda Strickland.

  She stepped forward as Barnum had. “We’ve been getting hammered with calls since last night, just hammered.”

  Joe stifled a smile.

  “The Casper and Cheyenne newspapers, radio stations from all over the state, and network affiliates from Billings and Denver have been calling,” she said, with a hint of pride. “CNN and Fox have contacted us as well. They’re all trying to figure out where Saddlestring is and how they can get here with a satellite truck.”

  “Do they know about the storm?” a deputy asked.

  Strickland nodded her head. “I told them about it, but most of them were already watching the weather. I guess this one’s supposed to be huge, much worse than the Christmas storm.”

  Joe heard men mumble about the severe winter storm warning, and predictions of three to five feet of snow in the mountains.

  “Which poses an opportunity, gentlemen,” Munker interjected. “The last thing we want is for this to turn into a standoff that’s the subject of every fucking twenty-four-hour news show in America. We cannot let these Sovereigns use the media to create sympathy, which they will do given the opportunity. They cannot be provided a forum for their twisted, antigovernment ravings. Believe me, I know. I was at Waco. I was at Ruby Ridge. I was in Garfield County, Montana, when the Freemen held out. If the press is here, we lose all tactical advantage. And there will be no possible way in hell for an efficient solution.”