Montana Standoff (11 page)

Steven slumped at his desk. “Could you send someone just to make sure nobody gets hurt?”

“I'll call dispatch, get my deputy up there. And I'll be there myself just as soon as I can.”

Steven hung up the phone, grabbed his keys and left the office. As the door shut behind him, he reflected on the irony that not moments ago he'd been wanting to escape the confines of these four walls. He'd been wanting desperately to see Molly. Now he was free of his office and on his way to a place where she would be, but instead of feeling exhilaration, he was filled with adrenaline fueled by cold, hard fear. Even at top speed, which at times wasn't very quick at all given the nature of the twisting mountain roads, it took him nearly forty minutes to reach the dirt road that the mining company had built to access the top of Madison. By that time he'd calmed his fears. By the time Molly arrived everything would be over. She wouldn't be caught in the middle of things. She'd be safe. She'd be okay.

But what if…?

Steven slammed on the brakes coming out of a sharp turn and the Jeep skidded sideways, coming to a stop scant inches from the rear bumper of a huge dump truck. As he climbed out of the vehicle, the reason why it was blocking the road became apparent. Several vehicles were parked abreast facing down the mountain access road. There were about twelve people standing in front of the these vehicles, holding signs saying things like
Stop Stealing Our Heritage! and No Permits = No Road = No Permission To Pass!

There was a dump truck parked facing up the mountain, and one visibly agitated dump-truck driver the size of Paul Bunyan standing in front of his truck and holding an industrial-size tire iron in two large fists. No deputy sheriff on the scene. No Sheriff Walker. Looked like Steven was going to have to keep the peace. Great.

“Okay,” Steven said, walking between the opposing forces. He stared the trucker in the eye. “These folks are no threat to you. There's no need for violence.”

“There's no need for them to be blocking the road,” the trucker said, his face dark with anger. He was a brute of a man with a huge beer belly, but most of the meat on him looked formidably powerful.

Steven reached inside his jacket pocket and withdrew his own copy of the injunction. “In point of fact, this road was constructed without the permits required by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Public Lands,” he said. “These papers were filed yesterday in federal court to stop all road-building activities until the permits are approved.”

The trucker flicked his eyes over the sheaf of papers Steven extended. “I don't give a damn what those papers say. I'm being paid to do a job, and I'm doing the job. No one from the mine has told me to stop, and they're the ones who sign my paycheck. You'd better tell these tree-hugging idiots to get out of my way, or sure as hell someone's gonna get hurt.”

“You should turn your truck around and go,” Amy Littlefield yelled out heatedly, advancing a few steps with her sign. “What you're doing here is illegal and you
should be arrested and thrown in jail. This is public land you're desecrating, it belongs to all of us, and you have no right to be tearing it up.”

“Amy,” Steven said, trying to catch her eye and give her a warning head shake, but she ignored him, her eyes bright and cheeks flushed with righteous anger.

“Look, lady,” the trucker said, emphasizing his words with the tire iron, “what I'm doing here is earning a living. I got kids to feed, and I don't give a rat's ass about much else. Now I'll say this just one more time. Move, or I'm gonna start busting some skulls.”

Steven stepped between the trucker and Amy. “You may want to think about the repercussions of doing that,” he said. “If you hurt anyone, you'll definitely go to jail, and you won't earn much of a living there. Take a look behind you. See that van with the satellite dish and the Channel 6 logo that just pulled up behind my Jeep? You bust any skulls and you'll be doing it live, for public consumption on the evening news.”

The trucker glanced behind him, his expression changing as the van disgorged a newscaster and videographer, both of whom hit the ground at a trot. “Looks like I'll be on the evening news anyway.”

“Probably,” Steven said, “but you could make things really bad for New Millennium if you play the part of a thug. Put the tire iron away. Think about your kids. Do you really want them to watch their father being hauled off to jail on prime time?”

“Come on, hurry up.” They heard the shrill command of the newswoman to her videographer as she raced toward them. “For the love of Pete, turn that damn camera on!”

The trucker glanced over his shoulder one last time, wavered, then tossed the tire iron on the ground. “Ah, shit,” he said, disgusted.

Another vehicle approached from the main road and Steven recognized Sheriff Walker emerging from a pickup truck. He was dressed in faded blue jeans, sneakers and a black police-issue ski jacket. Steven's relief was tempered with disappointment that Walker hadn't arrived in a cruiser with its siren blaring, wearing his official uniform. He felt a hand touch his arm and looked down at Amy, who grinned triumphantly, still brandishing her sign.

“Looks like we're going to get that publicity you said was so important,” she said as Walker approached the scene. He came to a halt and flashed his badge and ID briefly for the benefit of all to see.

“Sheriff Walker,” he announced. “Someone care to tell me what's going on?”

“These people blocked the road on me,” the trucker said. “All I want to do is my job, and they won't let me.”

“This road was built illegally and that man has no right to be driving his big dump truck over it,” Amy cried.

“That the truth?” Walker said to Steven, who was spared from having to explain by the deep rumble of what sounded like a fairly large convoy of industrial-size vehicles coming down the mountain road toward them. Everyone turned at the sound. Steven shouldered through the group of citizens, edged between their cars and looked up the access road. Walker came to stand beside him, and the reporter and her accompanying cameraman trotted up as the sound grew ominously louder and the earth began to tremble underfoot. The first ve
hicle loomed into view around the sharp curve and Steven saw Walker instinctively reached for the butt of his revolver even as he heard a most unladylike expletive from Channel 6 TV's roving reporter, Melissa Sue Pauley.

“Run for it!” she shouted.

Instead, Walker drew his pistol and stood his ground beside Steven in the middle of the mountain road while the gigantic dump truck growled in low gear toward them, followed by a fleet of others. “Sorry it took me so long to get here,” Walker apologized over the sound of the engines. “My deputy was responding to a traffic accident out on Puma Ranch Road and it took me a while just to get out of those damned waders.” He held up his badge as he spoke and waved it back and forth above his head, and when this had absolutely no effect he shoved it back inside his jacket and leveled his gun in both hands. “Okay, Young Bear,” he shouted, his voice nearly inaudible over the roar of the big motors. “There's backup from Bozeman on the way, should be here any minute, but what do you suggest we do in the meantime?”

“We hope they stop,” Steven shouted back.

But they didn't even slow down. The lead truck came straight for them, and they heard Melissa Sue Pauley shriek out, “No, you lame-brained idiot, keep the camera running! Get this footage.
Get it!
”

Steven wondered what the cameraman would get, what the nightly viewers would see as they sat in their warm living rooms and watched the world from a safe distance. Would the cameraman capture him and Walker being squashed beneath the aggressive and totally intim
idating tires of an entire squadron of monstrous dump trucks? Common sense told him that he should leap aside and let these behemoths mow down the barricade of civilian vehicles. Common sense was a good thing and it came in handy at times like this, but the sheriff obstinately stood his ground. Ninety feet shrunk to fifty in a heartbeat, and just as Steven decided to forcibly pull Walker aside, the sheriff fired a single warning shot into the air.

The response of the truck driver was to lay on his air horn and accelerate, two rash and foolhardy actions that caused Walker to lose his temper. For a shocked moment the sheriff stood in disbelief, and then, with the bumper of that massive truck less than twenty feet from him, he leveled his pistol and emptied the remaining five rounds into the truck, judiciously avoiding the driver and scaring the hell out of all the onlookers. The truck veered sharply to the left and came to an abrupt halt. The door wrenched open and the trucker jumped down, eyes wild.

“You okay, Clyde?” he bellowed, walking forward. “They hurtin' you?”

“Hands in the air, you stupid bastard! You are under arrest!” Walker shouted, moving to block his advance.

“They got a camera, Reggie,” the first trucker called out. “They says we'll be on the evening news.”

“You okay, Clyde?” the second trucker repeated as if his comrade hadn't spoken, still advancing toward Steven and the sheriff.

Without a moment's hesitation, Walker reached under his jacket and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. He handed them to Steven. “Cuff that damned idiot when I say so,” he said, and before Steven could respond,
Walker moved forward, a soldier marching resolutely into battle.

“You! Turn around! Hands in the air. I won't say it again,” he barked out with great authority.

He didn't, either, because at that very moment the big trucker called Reggie reached out, wrenched the empty pistol from Walker's hand and tossed it aside. He then lifted the sheriff and effortlessly threw him to the ground as well. “You okay, Clyde?” he said for the third time.

Walker scrambled to his feet and tackled Reggie from behind with the athletic finesse of a professional linebacker. They fell together in a heap on the flinty soil. “Cuff him now!
Now!
” he shouted to Steven, who had absolutely no idea how to get the cuffs around Reggie's wrists while the sheriff was grappling with him on the ground.
“Cuff him!”

Steven hovered, leaned forward, jerked back, felt a hand grab his arm. Clyde loomed beside him. “Don't hurt Reggie,” Clyde said. “He's just trying to protect me.”

“Talk to him, then, tell him to stop!” Steven said. “Tell him he's beating up an officer of the law!”

“Stop, Reggie! You're beating up an officer of the law!” Clyde said, but it was too late. The sheriff, with his ineffectual blows, had gotten Reggie mad, and Reggie had commenced to beat on the sheriff with those big fists. Steven reached down, still holding the cuffs, took a handful of Reggie's shirt and jerked backward, trying to pull him off the sheriff. The next thing he knew, stars were exploding in his head and he was flat on his back, spitting blood. He struggled to his knees in time to see several other truckers trotting toward the melee. Good, he thought. They're big enough to break up the fight. He
lurched to his feet just in time to be knocked down by Reggie's elbow as the trucker drew his arm back to hit the sheriff yet again. Another explosion of stars. He lost the handcuffs, was searching for them when a boot caught him in the ribs. Didn't see it coming. Flat on the ground again, dirt in his mouth, ears ringing with shouts and curses. Wondered if it wouldn't be wiser to stay down, but he rolled onto his knees. Had to help the sheriff. Reggie was out of control….

Afterward, Steven would wonder how he ever managed to survive that unfortunate day. He would later watch the complimentary copy of the tape that Melissa Sue Pauley had sent him with her thanks for helping her be nominated newswoman of the year, and he would wonder how
anyone
had survived. Over and over, with a kind of morbid fascination, he watched the unedited footage, feeling the same numbness come over him each time, the same overwhelming sense of his own foolishness. He saw himself trying to drag Reggie off Walker in the early moments, then trying to parry the blows of another trucker who was coming to Reggie's aid, and doing all right, doing pretty damn good for a lawyer wearing a suit and tie, actually holding his own in the fracas for a split second or two.

Melissa Sue Pauley's cameraman caught not only Walker's valiant struggle with Reggie, but the subsequent beatings both he and Steven took when the rest of the truckers jumped into the fracas while the rest of the protestors cringed back. It was violent, gruesome footage and the cameraman never flinched. Not even when Melissa Sue Pauley, in an extraordinary attempt to stop what appeared to be a run of violence that could easily
end in hot-blooded murder, shouted, “Stop! For the love of God, stop!
Stop! You're on live camera!
” Not even when Amy threw herself between the sheriff and Reggie and began striking at the huge trucker with her fists.

It was Amy's rash action that broke Reggie's concentration long enough for Clyde to shout, “You idiots, that's a cop Reggie's trying to kill! Stop him, before he gets us all thrown in jail for life!”

It was a command that Steven never heard until he watched the tape because by that point in time both he and the sheriff were beyond hearing anything at all.

 

B
Y THE TIME
M
OLLY ARRIVED
at the New Millennium access road, having chafed and champed during the entire commuter flight, fidgeted impatiently while the car-rental agency finished the paperwork and handed her the keys, and driven like a madwoman from Bozeman to Moose Horn, the confrontation was over. Most of the protesters had dispersed and the media had departed with their high-tech equipment in a frenzied rush to get their footage on the evening news. For a moment she hoped that nothing really bad had happened, but then she caught a glimpse of the yellow police tape cordoning off the road, and Steven's Jeep parked higher up, beyond the police cars and the roadblock. Her breath caught in her throat. She told herself that he was all right. Steven was a peaceful man. He wouldn't have gotten involved in any violence, he was just waiting for her, that's all. She parked her rental car behind the banner of yellow tape and hurried toward the nearest uniformed officer, who stood on the outskirts, scribbling notes in his log.