Endangered (5 page)

“Please, Joe?” Hatch pleaded.

Joe paused by his gate and looked over his shoulder at her. He said, “Not tonight. I’ve got a personal situation going on and I need to be home with my daughter.

“I’ll give you precise directions if you want, but I’m surprised you don’t know where it is. Believe me when I tell you there isn’t much more to find up there, and by the time you locate the site, it’ll be dark and snowing.”

“Let us decide that,” Wentworth said.

Joe turned and went to his truck and found his topo map of the benchland foothills. He spread it out on the hood of his truck and circled the location, then handed the map to Hatch.

“I’ll need that back when you’re through,” he said.

“I’ll return it,” she said with a smile.

Joe looked toward the Bighorns. They were obscured by storm clouds.

“You might want to wait until tomorrow,” he said.

“We heard you the first time,” Wentworth said. Then: “C’mon, Annie. Let’s go do the game warden’s job for him.”

“You do that,” Joe said, and turned to the house.

“Joe, is everything okay?” Hatch asked.

“Nope, it isn’t,” he said, and went inside.

—

L
UCY SAID
,
“They’re in love,” when Joe entered the mudroom and kicked off his cowboy boots. She was sitting on the couch with their Lab/corgi mix, Tube, in her lap. Since Sheridan and April had left the house, Tube had become Lucy’s dog.

“What?”

“They’re in love, those two. Or at least he’s in love with her. I was watching them through the window. What are their names?”

Joe told her, then said, “Lucy, they just work together.”

“Are they single?”

Joe said, “I don’t know. Annie Hatch is. I’m not sure about Wentworth. I saw a wedding ring on his finger when I first met him, but I don’t think he has it on now.”

Lucy nodded smugly. She had a gleam in her eye. She said, “He’s definitely not wearing it now.”

“How do you know he’s in love with her?” Joe asked, a bit flummoxed by his youngest daughter.

“Didn’t you notice their body language? She’s nice and friendly, but he’s very protective of her. He acts like he wants everyone to know he’s in charge. And when she put her hand on his shoulder, it calmed him down immediately. That wouldn’t happen if they just worked together.”

“I never would have noticed,” Joe said.

“No kidding,” Lucy said.

If Lucy was correct, Joe thought, it helped explain the almost religious fervor the sage grouse twins brought to their jobs. They’d been brought together by a single mission: to save a species. They spent hours and days together and they came from a certain bureaucratic mind-set. It made sense, and he wondered why he’d never noticed it before.

“Why didn’t you tell them about April?” Lucy asked. “I’m sure they’d understand.”

“It just didn’t seem right,” Joe muttered.

“They’ll know soon enough,” she said. “The word will get out.”

He nodded. Of course she was right. And the information would have wiped the smirk off Wentworth’s face.

Still, though . . .

—

“H
EY
,”
Lucy said to Joe as she ate a slice of pizza at the dining room table, “I want to show you something.”

She’d been browsing on her iPad while Joe skimmed the weekly Saddlestring
Roundup
. She turned the iPad in his direction.

“What are we watching?” Joe asked. He could see she’d already queued up a YouTube video.

“It took me about ten seconds to find Dallas Cates’s ride.”

Joe was suddenly interested. Lucy started the video. It was titled “Dallas Cates Riding Bushwhacker at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.” The date the video had been posted was three days before, but he knew that didn’t necessarily mean it was when it was taken.

It was an amateur video, shot by someone standing behind the chutes with a shaky handheld camera phone. There was no narration.

It began with a shot of Dallas buckling on the mandatory flak vest, then pulling his cowboy hat on tight. His face was grim and determined and practically set in stone. Then he turned and mounted the chute where Bushwhacker stood waiting.

The crowd sounds were loud in the background and there were snippets of conversation nearby. It was shoulder-to-shoulder behind the chutes: contestants, stock contractors, cowboys who were there to help their friends and offer advice. The visual swooped around at times as the videographer was jostled, and there were brief shots of the astrodome roof, the crowd, and dirt on the floor. Then the videographer managed to secure a good location right next to the chute itself.

The announcer said,
“Now, folks, you can turn your attention to chute number two, where the world champion bull rider from two years ago, Dallas Cates of Saddlestring, Wyoming, and Stephenville, Texas, prepares to go mano a mano with Bushwhacker, the 2014 Bull of the Year
.”

Joe and Lucy exchanged glances.

“Watch this close,” she said.

Dallas Cates lowered himself down on the back of the bull. He jammed his gloved right hand through the rope and used his left hand to pull his fingers through farther. The camera jostled again, and for a moment the screen was filled with overhead lights. Then it settled back on Dallas. He was hunched forward on the back of the bull, his left hand already poised in the air.

Someone shouted, “Ride ’im, Cates!”

The announcer said,
“Dallas Cates enters this go-round at number two in the world and number three in the standings. A good ride on this bull will vault him to first place!
Folks, Dallas Cates is eight seconds away from shocking the world.”

Behind the chute where Cates was mounted, a rodeo official pulled back hard on the flanking strap. The official would release it the moment the gate was thrown open.

Cates broke his concentration for a moment and glanced over at the stands. The camera followed, and there, for no more than a second, was April. She flashed a smile at Dallas and offered him two thumbs up.

Then Dallas turned back to the task at hand and nodded to the men outside the gate waiting for the signal to open it. Dallas had a certain something, Joe noted as he watched. He had a presence about him, real charisma. As much as Joe hated him, he couldn’t take his eyes off the man. No wonder the jeans company chose him as a spokesman, he thought.

Almost imperceptibly, Cates nodded to the men in the arena that he was ready.

Bushwhacker and Dallas exploded into the arena in a whirling combination of twists and bucks. The crowd went wild. Although the videographer missed part of it, Dallas Cates was thrown forward on the front shoulders of the bull, then rocked back. The cowboy flew through the air and landed flat on his back in the dirt behind the bull.

While the announcer said,
“Dallas Cates gets Bushwhacked in two-point-eight-seven seconds!”
the bull wheeled and lowered its head and charged Dallas, who scrambled backward like a crab.

Bullfighters dressed as clowns swooped in a second too late to distract the animal, and the bull either hooked or head-butted Cates with enough power to send him airborne again. There was an audible gasp from the fans, but despite the unreliable camerawork, Joe could see Cates roll to his feet and scramble up the chute boards to safety.

Then it was over.

“Let’s see it again,” Joe said.

They watched it three more times. It was April, all right, and it didn’t look like the two of them were at odds. After all, Dallas had looked over to her for last-second encouragement. She’d been beaming. Joe had rarely seen her look so happy or so excited.

“I told you,” Lucy said. She was focused on the relationship.

Joe was focused on the wreck of the ride.

The last glimpse of Dallas was of him climbing the chute boards and vaulting over the top into the ready area.

“That bull got Dallas,” Joe said, “but he looks pretty darned healthy when he runs away. I know adrenaline can make a man do all kinds of things, but I also know how much it hurts to get your ribs broken. There’s nothing worse. Dallas doesn’t look like he’s got broken ribs the way he’s flying over that chute gate. Plus, he was wearing one of those flak vests they all have to wear these days.”

Lucy looked over and said, “Does that mean those Cates people are lying?”

“I think it does,” Joe said.

—

H
E WAS FEEDING THE HORSES
in the barn after dinner when Marybeth called. She sounded shaken.

“The doctors say April has severe brain damage. She was hit multiple times in the head. There’s swelling around her brain.”

“Oh no,” he said, once again feeling his knees wobble.

“They say they want to put her into a medically induced coma.”

“A what?”

“A medically induced coma.”

“How bad is it, Marybeth?”

She said, “They really don’t know. They say she’s on the low end of the Glasgow Coma Scale, whatever that means. There’s no eye, verbal, or motor response. They need our permission to put her under, so I wanted to talk with you first.”

Joe shook his head. As if Marybeth could see him do it, she said, “The idea is to keep her unconscious and healing until the swelling in her brain goes down. They want to give her a drug called propofol to put her into the coma. The doctors say shutting down her functions will lower her blood pressure and reduce the swelling in her brain in case they have to do surgery later. It’ll give the brain time to heal. It’s what they did for Gabrielle Giffords, the U.S. representative who got shot in the head in Arizona, and what they do with other victims of blunt force trauma.”

Joe recalled the Giffords incident. He asked, “What do you think?”

“If they leave her the way she is, her body may shut off blood flow to the damaged parts of her brain. She’d be brain-dead.”

“Oh, man.”

When Marybeth didn’t speak for a moment, he realized she had lowered the phone to cry. He waited.

“It’s not a sure thing, so we have to brace ourselves,” she said after a moment, once she’d gathered herself together. He could imagine her wiping away tears on her cheeks as she talked. “It’s possible she’ll never come out of it. It’s also possible that they could bring her out of it, but there’s been so much damage, she’d never really be the same. But they’re good doctors and I trust them. They have a neurosurgeon on call in case they need to do surgery. All we can do is trust them and pray for her.”

Joe tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.

“How long?” he asked.

“Days, weeks, maybe months. They use propofol because it’s easily controlled and it has a short length. That’s so they can reduce the dosage when the swelling goes down and bring her out of the coma periodically. When they do, they can measure her Glasgow scale to see if she’s responding. They also measure brain activity through catheters in her brain.”

“Then we have to say yes,” Joe said.

“I agree. I’ll go sign whatever it is I have to sign and I’ll call you later tonight.”

—

J
OE WE
NT INSIDE
and told Lucy what Marybeth had said. Lucy nodded, wide-eyed, then got up and started toward her room to call her big sister, Sheridan.

In the threshold of the doorway, she asked, “Did April say for sure who did this to her?”

Joe shook his head.

“Will she ever be able to tell us?”

“We don’t know, Lucy.”

Lucy closed her eyes briefly, then shut the door behind her.

—

W
HEN
J
OE
’
S CELL PHONE
lit up an hour later, he lunged for it. He was halfway through his first bourbon and water. The television was on, but he had no idea what network it was tuned to.

He looked at the phone screen and scowled, then punched it live.

Annie Hatch said, “It’s a blizzard up here, Joe. We can’t see well enough to find the road to get back to town. Revis and I were hoping you could drive up here and kind of lead us back.”

“Did you find the site?”

“We think so, but we’re not sure. There’s so much snow in the sagebrush—”

“I told you not to go up there tonight,” he said.

“I know, I know,” she said wearily. “Do you think we wanted to call you?”

“Sit tight,” Joe said with irritation. “Don’t keep driving around. Just sit tight with your headlights on. How far did you go off the county road?”

“Not far, I don’t think.”

“Tell him to hurry,” Wentworth said in the background.

She didn’t, but Joe said, “Wentworth better keep his mouth shut or you’ll both be there all night.”

He heard her shush her partner.

As Joe laced on his boots in the mudroom, his phone lit up again. Reed.

“Mike,” Joe said.

“Are you sitting down?”

Joe braced for it, whatever it was.

“After you left this afternoon, the dispatcher got a 911 call. The reporting party said she heard about April through someone she knows at the hospital, and she recalled seeing a man she identified as Tilden Cudmore force a girl matching April’s description into his vehicle on the highway yesterday morning. She said she didn’t call it in at the time because she thought maybe Cudmore was her father and the girl was a runaway or something.”

Joe tried to process what Reed had just told him.

“Who made that call?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “She wouldn’t identify herself to the dispatcher.”

“But you think it was legitimate?”

“Yeah,” Reed said. “We’ve had run-ins with Cudmore a few times. He’s a survivalist type who lives by himself in a trailer out in the county. He’s a real piece of work. There have been rumors about him cruising the highways, driving well below the speed limit, like he’s looking for somebody, but we couldn’t hardly pick him up for that.

“Anyway, I sent a deputy out to his place, but he wasn’t home and his Humvee was gone. The deputy happened to look in the man’s dumpster and he found a purse inside with April’s ID. There’s also a backpack and some clothing we hope you can identify.”

Joe said, “Tilden Cudmore. You’ve thrown me for a loop.”