Endangered (15 page)

“They take the second pump truck out if Eldon is already on a job,” Brenda said. “Sometimes when people call us, they can’t wait for Eldon to get there. You know, like if it’s a sewage emergency.”

Joe nodded like he understood.

She said, “Now, why are you asking about Thursday the thirteenth?”

Joe pointed to the north. “Someone was up there on BLM land causing mischief. I was wondering if you or anyone might have seen a vehicle or heard anything.”

Although Brenda had no reaction to the question, Joe saw Bull’s shoulders relax. He knew that whatever dilemma he might have been facing had passed. Yet Bull clearly felt guilty about
something
.

“What was I supposed to see?” Brenda asked. “I’m usually in the kitchen at night. The window looks out the front of the house, not the side. So I really can’t say I saw anything. Now, can I ask you a question?”

Joe nodded.

“What’s the real reason you’re here?”

“I just told you,” Joe said. But he was afraid his face might betray him.

“You’re here to see Dallas with your own eyes, aren’t you?” she said. “You still think my Dallas had something to do with what happened to April, even though he was here at home and they caught the man who did it and hauled him to jail.” She sounded both angry and disappointed with Joe. He felt a twinge of remorse.

A woman’s voice from inside the house called out, “Who’s out there, Bull?”

“Damned game warden,” Bull said without turning his head.

“The one who put you out of business?
That
motherfucker?”

Cora Lee,
Joe thought.

“Yep, it’s him,” Bull said.

“Tell him to get the fuck off our property,” she said from inside. “Maybe I ought to let the dogs out to chase him away. He got no right comin’ on private property if we don’t invite him.”

Brenda’s eyes narrowed as she glared at Joe. “Is that true?” she asked.

“It is,” he said. “But I’m not here looking for any trouble. I’m here trying to get some information on an ongoing investigation.”

“An investigation of what?” Brenda asked, suspicious.

“I seen a truck up there,” Eldon said from behind Joe. It surprised him, and he jumped. Eldon had been in the garage working on one of the pumpers, judging by the grease and muck on his bib overalls. The whine of the motor in the garage had covered his approach. There was a long, heavy wrench in his right hand.

Joe said, “How long have you been behind me?”

“Long enough to hear what you asked,” Eldon said.

Joe nodded toward the garage. “Do you suppose you could shut that thing down so we can hear each other?”

“Naw,” Eldon said. “I’m usin’ it. I gotta power-wash them tanks out or they really start to smell rank. Especially now that it’s gettin’ warmer.”

Frustrated, Joe said, “You saw a truck up there last Thursday night?”

“I did,” Eldon said. “I got home in time for supper. I parked my pumper in the garage. As I was walkin’ to the house, I looked up there in the hills and saw it. Then I heard a bunch of shots. I didn’t think much of it at the time. People are always goin’ up there and shootin’ the shit out of things. There ain’t a BLM sign or marker that ain’t shot to shit.”

It was true. Joe asked, “What did the truck look like?”

“White, new. I thought it was one of them fed trucks. I see them all over.” He looked past Joe to Brenda. “Remember when those two federal knuckleheads came here last month asking about sage grouse? A man and a woman?”

“I do remember,” Brenda said. “They wanted to know if we had any sage grouse on our land. It seemed like a dumb question.”

Eldon said, “I told ’em if I did, I would have shot all them prairie chickens by now and roasted them. They didn’t like that one bit.”

Bull laughed at his dad’s humor.

Eldon said, “You can’t even eat the big ones, the bombers. They’re no good for nothin’ but jerky. But the young ones are pretty tender. Right, Brenda?”

“Right, they are,” she said.

Joe had been watching the two of them, back and forth, as if viewing a tennis match. He found it interesting how both of these big men deferred to Brenda at all times.

Joe said to Eldon, “Are you talking about Annie Hatch of the BLM and Revis Wentworth of the Fish and Wildlife Service?”

“That sounds like their names,” Eldon said. “They gave me their cards, but I used them to start a fire in the fireplace.”

Bull snorted again. He thought that was a good one.

In the distance, Joe thought he heard a high-pitched scream from the air compressor.

“Better shut that thing off,” Joe said.

“Why?” Eldon asked.

“Sounds like the bearings are going.”

Eldon shrugged. “It’s always something.”

Joe gave up.

“Are you sure it was their truck you saw?” he asked.

“No,” Eldon said. “I ain’t sure. But that’s what I thought at the time—‘Those sage grouse feds are back.’ But that’s a hell of a long way up there, and I just saw the white truck for a few seconds. Then I heard a bunch of shooting.”

Bull folded his arms over his chest and said to Joe, “There can’t be that many new white pickups in the county, can there?”

Joe was thinking the same thing. He asked Eldon what time he’d seen the white truck.

Eldon shrugged and said, “Six-thirty, maybe?” He looked to Brenda for confirmation.

“That sounds right,” she said. “We usually eat at six forty-five. We try to get done by the time
Wheel of Fortune
comes on.”

The timing worked, Joe thought. But it didn’t make sense—until he thought back on what Lucy had observed in regard to Hatch and Wentworth. Then it did.

“So,” Brenda said to Joe, “you want to see Dallas?”

The offer took Joe aback. “Yup,” he said.

“Come on in,” she said. “You’ll see that he’s as banged up as I told you he is. Then maybe you’ll finally believe us and leave us alone.”

Bull said, “He can come back, Mom. Just so it’s dark out and there’s no witnesses for when I whup his ass.”

“Damned straight, Bull,” Cora Lee laughed from inside the house.

As Joe mounted the peeling steps of the porch, he glanced over his shoulder to see if Eldon was coming in. The man was lumbering back to the garage, swinging the wrench back and forth at his side.

Joe heard the air compressor whine again. He hoped the bearings would burn out and disable the engine so he could think clearly without the background noise.

Brenda cracked the front door and leaned inside. “Cora Lee, put them dogs out back in their run. We’re comin’ in.”

T
he sound of the compressor muted as Joe stepped inside the house and the door was closed behind him. He removed his hat and held the brim with two hands.

“He’s in the back,” Brenda said.

Cora Lee was sprawled on a couch with one leg cocked over the arm. She was watching television, and she refused to look at Joe. That was okay with him. The show that blared from the flat-screen was something about spring break in Florida. Lots of bikinis and abs.

The house was small, cluttered, and close. It smelled of baked goods from the kitchen. The furnishings were familiar to Joe from so many visits to area homes: a unique combination of hunting memorabilia crossed with Wild West kitsch. An elk mount dominated the wall over a fireplace, and the fabric of the couch and chair was a motif of bucking horses and lariats. The low-hanging chandelier was a reproduction of a wagon wheel, with dusty little bulbs on each spoke. The adjacent wall, which melded into the hallway, was covered with cheaply framed photographs of rodeo action shots. Dallas riding a bull, Dallas on a saddle bronc, Dallas flying his hat like a Frisbee in an outdoor arena after a particularly good ride.

“That one is my favorite,” Brenda said as Joe leaned in to the picture. “It was taken three years ago at Cheyenne Frontier Days when Dallas won it. The ‘Daddy of ’Em All,’” she said.

A china hutch in the corner contained nothing but silver and gold buckles Dallas had won across the nation. There were four sparkling shelves of them.

As Joe passed by the wall, he searched for photos of the rest of the family and found one: an old shot of Bull, Timber, and Dallas with their arms around one another. It looked like it had been taken on a camping trip more than a decade ago. Bull’s mouth was agape and he looked simple. Timber was wiry and lean, and his eyes were closed as he smiled. Both brothers towered over Dallas, who stared straight at the camera with a kind of alarming confidence for a boy that small. By the looks of the photo, Dallas would have been nine or ten at the time, Joe thought. That was it as far as photos of his brothers went. The rest of the front room was a shrine to Dallas Cates. A stranger entering the house could have reasonably assumed Dallas was an only child.

Joe inadvertently glanced at Bull, who stood glowering by the door. As if Bull could read Joe’s mind, he winced and looked away. Joe almost—but not quite—felt sorry for him.

—

D
ALLAS RECLINED
in an overstuffed chair in what appeared to be his old bedroom, judging by the yellowed rodeo posters on the walls and the photos of him playing football, wrestling, and running track as a Saddlestring High School Wrangler. He was watching a small television between his sock-clad feet. When Joe entered the room, Dallas turned his head stiffly and his eyes registered surprise when he recognized Joe. He lifted the remote and clicked off the set.

“Mr. Pickett,” Dallas said.

“Dallas.”

It wasn’t a ruse, Joe quickly determined. Dallas
had
been seriously injured. His face was still puffy and his left eye was swollen shut. The bruises on his face and neck were entering the gruesome blue, green, and yellow phase. His left arm was in a sling.

“I thought I heard Mom talkin’ to someone out there.” Dallas’s voice was muted and airier than Joe remembered. He attributed it to a throat injury.

Joe said, “Yup.”

Dallas winced as he shifted his weight in the recliner to face Joe. Even in his condition, Dallas radiated a kind of raw physical power, Joe thought. Muscles danced and his tendons popped beneath his skin as he moved. Sinew corded in his neck.

“Nothin’ hurts like busted ribs,” Dallas said, and he lifted the front of his baggy sweatshirt. His midsection was wrapped, but Joe could see the bruised discoloration on Dallas’s skin above and below the bandage.

“I broke my ribs once,” Joe said. “I know how it hurts.”

“It’s not so bad,” Dallas said with one of the big boxy grins he was famous for. “It only hurts when I breathe. Or talk. Or eat. Or try to move.”

Joe nodded sympathetically.

“Dr. Jalbani at the clinic in town says the only thing I can do is rest and let the ribs heal on their own. There’s nothing they can do to speed up the recovery. Did you know that?”

“I did.”

“When did Saddlestring get a Pakistani doctor?” Dallas asked. “It seems kind of funky.”

“He’s been here for two years.”

“Well,” Dallas said, “that just shows you how much I’ve been around, I guess.”

Dallas suddenly got serious, and said, “How’s April doing, Mr. Pickett?”

Joe realized Brenda was standing in the door right behind him. Dallas had glanced over to her before he asked the question. Joe wondered if Brenda had silently prompted it.

“She’s in bad shape,” Joe said. “She’s in a coma in a hospital in Billings.”

“Man,” Dallas said, “that’s bad news.” Then: “Is she going to make it?”

“We’re optimistic,” Joe lied.

Dallas nodded. And kept nodding. Then another quick glance to Brenda behind Joe’s shoulder.

“Has she been able to communicate?” Dallas asked.

“No.”

“Man, that’s rough. Will she ever be able to talk?”

“We hope so.”

Yet another glance. Joe considered whipping his head around so he could catch Brenda coaching her son, but he didn’t.

“Well, if she recovers, I hope you’ll tell her how sorry I am this happened to her,” Dallas said. “I mean, we had our problems and all, especially at the end. But she means a lot to me. I can’t stand to think of her stuck in some hospital room like that. So tell her I’m thinkin’ about her, will you?”

Joe nodded.

“Maybe I’ll be up and around soon,” Dallas said. “Billings ain’t that far.”

He paused, then said, “If that’s okay with you and Marybeth, I mean.”

Joe didn’t want to say,
There’s nothing to see
. And he didn’t like Dallas using his wife’s name so casually. He said, “I’ll let you know when she’s better. Maybe we can work something out.”

“That’d be great, Mr. Pickett.”

He seemed almost sincere, almost eager. Joe thought perhaps he had always judged Dallas too harshly. He’d been put off by his mannerisms, his history, his too-eager-to-please persona.

But maybe, Joe conceded, it had as much to do with the fact that April had left with him while Joe and Marybeth were away. That it had been Dallas’s fault as much as April’s why she had left.

Joe asked, “How long have you been back, Dallas?”

“Since March tenth,” he answered quickly.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Brenda said from behind Joe.

“Not the thirteenth?” Joe pressed.

“Hell no,” Dallas said, letting some heat show through, although the grin was still frozen on his face. “I see what you’re doin’ here.”

“Just had to check,” Joe said. “I’m sorry.”

“You ought to be,” Brenda said.

Joe looked back at her. She wasn’t as angry as he’d expected. Oddly, she looked relieved.

“Well,” Joe said to Dallas, “I hope you’re up and around soon.”

Dallas’s grin turned into a bigger box. “The only good thing about it is, I couldn’t have gotten busted up at a better time. I lost my entry fees on the Rodeo All-Star gig in Dallas, of course, but the big fun doesn’t really start until June. By then, it’ll be a rodeo a day, and sometimes two, through the rest of the summer. That’ll be one paycheck after another. I plan to turn this setback right around and light up the PRCA all the way to the national finals. I ain’t the first cowboy to get hurt, you know.”

Joe agreed.

“You and Marybeth ought to come see me at the Daddy, last week of July,” Dallas said, meaning Cheyenne. “I can get you some passes for the east-side stands.”

“Maybe,” Joe said.

“And you let me know how April’s doin’, okay?”

“Yup,” Joe said.

—

“S
O
,”
B
RENDA SAID
as they went down the hall toward the living room, “are you finally satisfied?”

Joe said, “I have to say I am.”

There was no way Dallas could have administered such a serious beating to April in his condition. The broken ribs alone would have prevented it, Joe knew. He remembered the searing pain he had experienced simply lacing up his boots. And how Dallas had managed to drive from Houston to Saddlestring in his condition was both foolish and heroic, Joe thought.

Brenda shook her head and said, “You’re a hardheaded man.”

“I just needed to be sure,” Joe said. “I guess it still stings that April ran off.”

Brenda reached out and grasped his elbow before he entered the front room, and he turned.

She nodded at the Cheyenne photo of Dallas flinging his hat and said, “You know, this community don’t appreciate what we’ve got here.”

Joe was momentarily puzzled.

“Dallas,” she said. “He’s a
champion
. He’s our world-class athlete, and he comes from right here in Twelve Sleep County. There should be signs outside the town telling everyone they’re entering the home of Dallas Cates. There should be parades every summer. We ought to name the high school after him, or at least the rodeo arena.”

Her eyes were blazing.

“I talked to your wife about it a while back. I was trying to get her on board because I think she’d have some influence, bein’ the head of the library and all. Maybe you can talk to her. Maybe you can let her know what a big deal that boy is back there. Sometimes I think people around here don’t appreciate what they’ve got. They see Eldon pumping out their septic tanks and they don’t think, ‘That man—he’s the father of a champion.’ They just think, ‘That man is pumping out my shit.’”

Her grip on his arm was surprisingly strong.

She leaned into him and said, “What do we have to do to get it through all the thick skulls around here that they’ve got a rodeo champion right here? Who grew up right here? What’s wrong with them?”

“Brenda,” Joe said, “I don’t know that I’m the right guy to ask.”

“That boy back there is special,” she said. “He’s one-in-a-million. Do you know how many people have asked me about how he’s doing? Less than ten, I’ll tell you that. The newspaper should have been out here. The mayor should have been out here.”

“I hear you,” Joe said. He meant that literally, not that he actually agreed. He thought,
Too many locals know about Dallas’s role in the sexual assault when he was in high school. Too many locals had been beaten up or terrorized by Timber before he was sent to prison. Too many local hunters have been burned by Eldon or Bull while they’re out trying to get meat for the winter. Too many locals have been harangued by Brenda about building monuments to her son.

He said, “Have you thought about letting it be their idea instead of yours?”

Her face turned to stone. After a beat, she said, “It would never happen. They all look down on us. We know if we don’t take care of ourselves, no one else will.”

“That isn’t my experience,” Joe said. “People around here are pretty decent. Maybe you ought to give ’em a chance.”

She looked at him with contempt.

“Thanks for letting me see him,” he said, twisting away from her grip.

He clamped on his hat and reached for the doorknob. Behind him, Brenda Cates said, “Don’t forget what we talked about here, Joe Pickett.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t.”

He couldn’t get out of the Cates home fast enough.

—

J
OE FROWNED
against the sound of the air compressor until he was back in his pickup. Daisy was happy to see him, but she threw nervous looks toward the house as if expecting the pack of dogs to come out at any second. As Joe backed up and pointed the nose of his pickup toward the gate, he noted that Brenda was watching him out the kitchen window and that Bull had cocked back the curtains in the living room.

As he squared the pickup to leave, he saw Dallas’s late-model four-wheel-drive pickup parked on the side of an equipment shed filled with a flatbed trailer with two snowmobiles on it. The pickup was a gleaming red Ford F-250 with a chrome cowcatcher and Texas plates. PRCA, PBR, and NFR stickers were on the windows. Anyone in the know would recognize the acronyms for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, Professional Bull Riders, and National Finals Rodeo.

Eldon stood in the shadows inside the garage next to one of his pump trucks. Joe waved good-bye to him, but Eldon didn’t wave back. Joe could see the compressor vibrating at Eldon’s feet. Oddly, there didn’t seem to be a pneumatic hose attached.

—

S
OMEBODY
LET THE DOGS
out of their run and they followed Joe’s pickup all the way to the county road. When he finally turned onto the graded road, he called Marybeth on his cell phone.

“I saw Dallas Cates,” he said. “He didn’t do it.”

“You
saw
him? Where?”

“At his house. I was checking out this sage grouse thing and the Cates place was within sight, so I stopped by to see if they’d seen anything.”

“How
convenient
,” she said, deadpan.

He described Dallas’s condition.

She said, “There was still a small part of me that was suspicious. Now I guess we can move on.”

He agreed. “They’re an odd bunch, though. Brenda buttonholed me about the town doing more to recognize her son. She might have a point, but she’s a little scary when she gets going.”

“She does that to everyone,” Marybeth said.

“Oh, and I might have gotten a lead on who shot all those birds,” he said.

“Who?”

“I’ll tell you when I get back,” Joe said, knowing he was about to hit a long dead zone for cell phone coverage. Then: “I’ll have to tread real lightly on this one.”

His phone blinked out and he didn’t know if she’d heard that last part.

—

T
EN MINUTES LATER
,
Liv heard the compressor shudder into silence. She knew what it meant and she fought back tears. Whoever had arrived was gone.

The footfalls came and she could tell there were two sets of them.

“Open that up,” a woman said from above. Liv recognized the voice as belonging to the person who’d claimed she was Kitty Wells.