Open Season (19 page)

Joe took off his hat and sat down. There wasn't much to look at. The sprawling cinder-block building had been built in the early 1960s, and the walls were painted institutional yellow and lit with industrial neon tubes. The hallway was narrow and the black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor was scarred. It was the kind of hallway that echoed and amplified the rat-a-tat sounds of clicking heels as people walked down it. Not that there were many employees about; most of the doors in the hall were shut and there were no lights on behind the glass. He recognized many of the names on the doors as his agency superiors, but apparently they were already gone for the day. As he sat waiting for Les Etbauer, Joe realized that he felt as though he was back in grade school and he'd been sent to the principal's office. Like most of the field wardens, Joe had spent as little time as possible inside this building. This was where the agency bureaucracy was, where policy was set and regulations formed. It was here that the director met with the governor and individual legislators while they were in town for the legislative session and where laws and new regulations were hammered out and concessions were made. This was the place where hunters, fishermen, landowners, and environmentalists stormed (although they rarely made it past the front counter) when things didn't go their particular way. It was the place where all of those departmental memos came from. It was a place where they knew him, but he really didn't know them.

During the long drive to Cheyenne, Joe had had a lot of time to think. He had mulled over not only where the investigation of the outfitter murders seemed to be leading him, but also about the things Vern had said in the bar. It was the first time since this had all started that Joe had had the free time to try and put the things that he'd learned together. The conclusions he had reached unsettled him.

A man with an open collar and a short-sleeved dress shirt that stretched across his large belly approached from an office far down the hallway, and Joe looked up at him as he passed. The man stopped warily and turned around.

“You're Joe Pickett?” The man asked.

Joe nodded.

The man looked down the hall in both directions to make sure no one was coming.

“I just want you to know that there are a lot of people here who think you're getting screwed.”

“Really?” Joe had not realized he had been the subject of discussion at headquarters, although the behavior of two license clerks behind the counter had hinted at that.

The man took a tentative step toward Joe and bent forward. “We hope you fight it and take it all the way to the governor,” he said. “This kind of good old boy shit has gone far enough.”

Joe was confused. “You seem to know a lot more about what's going to happen here than I do.”

The man snorted and a smug look passed over his face. “Why do you think they'd want you here at four o'clock on Friday afternoon if the whole thing wasn't cut and dried? Think about it. If you get mad and want to protest, there's nobody to hear you until Monday morning.”

“What ...” Joe started to ask but the man turned quickly on his heel and continued down the hall. The receptionist had reappeared.

 

He was going
to be suspended. It was simply a matter of time until Etbauer pronounced those words. He had said a lot of words, Joe thought, but not those. Joe sat and listened. His mouth was dry, and his hands were wet. He couldn't quite believe this was happening even as he sat there. In his career, he had never received either a verbal or a written warning regarding his conduct, except for when he arrested the new governor for fishing without a license. His performance reviews had always been good if not brilliant. He had done his job well, he thought, to the best of his ability and according to regulations. He had tried very hard to be honest and fair. He had not cut corners, and he had worked hard. The time he spent working was far beyond what was required of him and he never asked for overtime or compensatory time. He never cheated on expense reports. He had reported what had happened with Ote Keeley because it was the right thing to do. He had never even suspected that it would result in anything but, at the worst, a mild reprimand. After all, he had recovered the weapon and arrested Ote with an ironclad case of poaching.

But he was going to be suspended. Joe felt as though the wind had been kicked out if him.

Etbauer went on and on in a thin, nasal voice. He sat behind his desk and read aloud the report Joe had written about Ote Keeley taking his gun. When he was through reading Joe's report, Etbauer found the passages in the agency handbook that pertained to department-issued firearms and read those aloud. Joe hoped like hell that Etbauer wouldn't notice that he wasn't wearing his gun now and ask him about it.

Etbauer had a wide, flushed alcoholic face and thick, photo-gray glasses. Joe also noticed that he was balding. He didn't speak with Joe as much as speak to him. There was a quiver in his voice, and he mispronounced some of the words. It was as if Etbauer was reading aloud from a script.

Joe didn't know much about Etbauer, but he had heard things. According to Wacey, Etbauer had gone straight from the U.S. Army to the Game and Fish Department without a real job in between. Wacey had called Etbauer “the ultimate government employee,” a man who had never collected a paycheck in his life that wasn't from either the state or the Federal government. He had attained his rank due to a particularly bureaucratic method known as ADV or “advanced due to vacancy.” That meant that Etbauer simply put in his time and moved up as others moved out or retired. As state employees either left to take other jobs or start businesses of their own, bureaucrats like Etbauer (who no private sector employer would ever want on the payroll) simply grew in power and seniority like a tumor within the agency, amassing security and building a fine pension.

Joe had always considered individual words as finite units of currency, and he believed in savings. He never wanted to waste or unnecessarily expend words. To Joe, words meant things. They should be spent wisely. Joe sometimes paused for a long time until he could come up with the right words to express exactly what he wanted to say. Sometimes it confused people (Marybeth fretted that perhaps people thought Joe was slow) but Joe could live with that. That's why Joe despised meetings where he felt the participants acted as if they were paid by the number of words spoken and, as a result, the words began to cheapen by the minute until they meant nothing at all. In Joe's experience, the person who talked the most very often had the least to say. He sometimes wished that every human was allotted a certain number of words to use for their lifetime. When the allotment ran out, that person would be forced into silence. If this were the case, Joe would still have more than enough in his account while people like Les Etbauer would be very quiet. Joe had attended meetings where little got accomplished except what he considered the random drive-by spewing of words, like unaimed machine-gun bullets. What a waste of words, he often thought. What a waste of currency. What a waste of bullets.

Joe realized that there had finally been a pause and snapped back to the present. Etbauer was staring at him.

“I said,” Etbauer asked, miffed that Joe had ignored him, “how could something like this happen?”

“Easier than you might think,” retorted Joe.

Etbauer narrowed his eyes with scorn. This was not the answer he had been waiting to hear.

“I was writing out a citation,” Joe said. “It's in the report. I was holding the clipboard with one hand and a pen with the other. I admit that I wasn't prepared for what happened, and I regret that it happened, and it's my fault that I let it happen.”

“But he took your weapon,” Etbauer said, as if bolstering his case. “He took it from you while you just stood there.” Etbauer said it with disbelief, as if he couldn't imagine anyone being as stupid as Joe Pickett.

Joe stood up suddenly from his chair, reached across the desk, plucked Etbauer's name badge from his shirt pocket and sat back down. Etbauer looked at him with wide eyes, and a hint of panic.

“See what I mean?” Joe asked, holding up the name badge. “Even if you realize what's going on, sometimes you just can't react quickly enough because you're kind of boggled that it's happening in the first place.”

Etbauer swallowed, trying to recover his authority. But his voice was weak: “Give me back my badge.”

Joe slid it across the desk. “You thought I was going to pop you in the mouth, didn't you?” Joe asked. “And you still weren't able to do anything about it. Well, that's what happened with Ote. I screwed up, but I didn't expect it at the time. Just like you.”

Etbauer's face was now bright red. He wouldn't look Joe in the eye. When he said that he had carefully reviewed the report and the evidence and that his determination was that Joe was to be officially suspended without pay as of next Tuesday, September 30, he was declaring all of it to a place on the wall behind and far to the right of where Joe sat.

In addition, Etbauer said, there had been some other very disturbing reports. Serious allegations.

“We plan to investigate whether or not there has been a serious dereliction of duty while you investigate murders that have already been solved. And there is some question of whether or not you destroyed evidence that could link the accused to the crime.”

When Joe asked who had made the reports, Etbauer cautioned that “he was not at liberty to say.” Joe felt a chill snake down his spine.

Etbauer continued. “Let me inform you right now that because of your recent actions and behavior, we are going to investigate whether or not you should be a suspect in the crimes themselves. Do you understand the gravity of this?”

Joe nodded. He certainly did, but he had trouble speaking.

“Me, a suspect?” he finally croaked.

“You, a suspect,” Etbauer confirmed, his smile cruel. “We hope you can be cleared quickly because, frankly, if you aren't, it would cast the entire department under a black cloud, and we wouldn't want that.”

Joe sighed. Etbauer was clearly a vicious, petty bureaucrat who lived for opportunities like this.

“Department policy states that you can challenge the suspension at the next Game and Fish Commission meeting, which takes place at the end of next month, by submitting a written appeal to the director. You've got three days to journal your area. Your duties will be turned over to an interim warden in an adjacent district who will be assigned on Monday.”

Joe discovered that his mouth was too dry to swallow.

“You're dismissed,” Etbauer said. “There's not much more I can say right now.”

Joe stood. He knew it would all hit him later, but at the moment he felt both angry and oddly calm.

“At least give the Saddlestring district to Wacey Hedeman,” Joe said. “He knows it pretty well, and he's a good hand.”

“We'll consider it.” Etbauer said, fingering the name badge Joe had snatched. “You're dismissed.”

Before Joe opened the door, he turned to Etbauer.

“Have you ever done this before?” Joe asked. “Suspended an active field warden for this kind of first-time violation?”

Etbauer flushed again and looked away. Joe followed Etbauer's sight line. He was looking at a digital clock on a credenza behind him. It was 4:58 P.M.

“Anybody tell you to do this now?” Joe asked.

“Of course not,” Etbauer replied, still looking at the clock.

“Nobody called you and said, ‘Les, I need you to move this Pickett gun thing to the top of the pile'?”

Etbauer wheeled around in his chair. “Of course not.” He was defensive. “This conversation is over.”

Joe opened the door. The receptionist who had been standing outside, listening, quickly gathered herself together and escaped down the hallway, her shoes clicking like an old Royal typewriter.

“It was never a conversation,” Joe said to Etbauer. “A lynching maybe, but not a conversation.”

He slammed the door so hard behind him that he stopped in the hall to make sure he hadn't cracked the glass.

 

He found an
unoccupied, unlocked office and called Marybeth at the Kensinger house. Joe still felt strangely calm, but the need to talk to his wife was urgent. He wanted her thoughts after he told her what had happened. When she answered the telephone, he asked her how she liked the new place.

“Oh, it's nice,” she said, but he could tell from her voice that she was completely enraptured. “Five bedrooms, four bathrooms. A beautiful deck that overlooks the Twelve Sleep River, a Jacuzzi, a kitchen the size of our house and a dining room the size of a stadium. All of the closets are walk-in and so is the refrigerator. A breakfast bar and three fireplaces, one in the master bedroom. Mom and Lucy just love it. Right now, they're out walking Maxine and the Kensinger dog around the golf course.”

Joe felt better just hearing her voice. After what he'd just been through, he needed to hear it.

“You didn't mention Sheridan,” Joe said. “What does she think?”

Marybeth paused before she spoke. “I don't know for sure. She doesn't seem real excited for some reason. She didn't eat any lunch, and she didn't want to go out with Mom. She's just sitting in the living room staring out the window.”

“Is it just the change of scenery?” Joe asked, thinking about how much they had moved Sheridan around from place to place in the last few years. The consistency and routine of the Saddlestring house was something Sheridan obviously enjoyed. Maybe she thought they were moving again.

“I hope that's all it is,” Marybeth said. “I hope she isn't coming down with something.”