Shots Fired (20 page)

F
ourteen-year-old Hattie Sykes was awake when her grandfather cracked the bedroom door ajar and said, “Ready to hit the river?”

Because he was deaf he spoke loudly, assuming everyone else was deaf as well. She could see he was wearing his fly-fishing clothes: old chest waders held up by suspenders, a thick red shirt, a fishing vest, a short-brimmed Stetson.

She said, “It's not even light out yet.”

“Hell, I gave you an extra thirty minutes.”

“What time is it?”

“Five forty-five. Damned late.”

Hattie moaned. The room smelled of her brother Jake in the next bed. Nothing smelled as awful as a sixteen-year-old boy in a closed room.

“Anyone else coming?” he asked.

“No, they said they'd rather sleep in.”

“I'm not surprised!” he boomed.

•   •   •

S
HE WATCHED
as he missed with the egg. Instead of cracking it into the pan, the runny yolk and white slithered onto the burner. He cursed, caught himself, and said, “Sorry.”

“Let me do it,” she said, getting up from the table.

“My eyes don't work until they're warmed up,” he said, stepping aside.

While she scrambled eggs on a clean burner and cleaned up the mess, he shuffled around the kitchen with a cup of coffee. She didn't like coffee but she liked the smell of it in the morning, especially in her grandfather's lodge. Especially before they went fishing.

Her two older brothers, Jake and Justin, were still sleeping downstairs. Justin was the oldest and landed the spare bedroom to himself. Her parents were in the master bedroom on the top floor. Her grandfather had given them that room because he no longer liked climbing the stairs. Plus, they liked to sleep late after a night spent emptying the liquor cabinet.

The sun broke over the mountains and lit up the dew on the grass like sequins. Her grandfather walked haltingly toward the river with his fly rod and she followed. He was a tall man with wide shoulders, but from the back he seemed to be caving in on
himself. She'd seen photos of him when he was young, before he started his company, married her grandmother, raised her mother, and got rich. He was brash and dashing, with jet-black hair and high, almost Indian cheekbones. Those high cheekbones now made his face look skeletal, and his once-sharp eyes were filmy. A fleshy dewlap under his jaw swayed as he walked. Since her grandmother died the year before, he'd turned into an old man and he preferred to live at his lodge on the river rather than at his big house in town.

“I wrote a story at school,” Hattie said. “I called it ‘Fishing with My Grandpa.'”

“Did I catch a lot of big fish in it?” he asked.

“Well, one.”

“I hope you got an A.”

“I did.”

•   •   •

I
N THE CAR
on the way to the lodge her parents had talked softly, assuming the three children were all sleeping. Hattie was faking it, and listened.

“I won't miss this annual pilgrimage to visit the old coot,” her father said.

“I know,” her mother agreed.

“This is probably the last year we can make the boys come,” he said. “With no Wi-Fi or video games, what are they supposed to do? It's ridiculous.”

“Jay . . .”

“Every year we pay homage,” her dad said. “I hope to hell it's worth it for us in the end. Just another year or two, I think.”

“It means a lot to him,” her mother said.

“It better mean a lot to
us
.”

“Hattie still likes it.”

“She's going to grow up, too. And then what?”

•   •   •

S
HE WATCHED
as her grandfather struggled to tie the tippet to the leader of his line. His fingers were long and bony, the backs of his hands mottled with spots. He couldn't see well enough to make a knot.

“Can I help?”

“Do you know how to tie a blood knot?”

“Yuck,” she said, taking the two strands.

He laughed. “There's no blood involved.”

He told her how to cross the lines over each other, twist the ends around the opposite length, and pull the tips through the loop to secure it. She was surprised at how well the knot turned out.

“It's not about blood,” he said, thanking her, “it's about the knot.”

He cast gracefully. He told her fly-fishing was an elegant sport, and she agreed. There was a V-shaped braided current in the river created by a rock. There was usually a fish there, but he wasn't presenting the fly far enough upstream.

She said, “More to your right.”

He shifted his feet and squared his shoulders, cast again, and the fly drifted through the braid. She saw the trout come up out of the depths and take it.

“Fish on,” he said, raising the tip of his rod to set the hook. She clapped her hands and was surprised when he handed the rod to her.

“Bring it in, Hattie,” he said. “You can do it.”

After landing the rainbow trout—it looked metallic and beautiful in the morning sun—she released it back into the water. She was thrilled, and when she stood up he slipped his fishing vest over her narrow shoulders.

“It's yours,” he said. “The rod, too. Now catch another one.”

As they walked back to the lodge at midmorning, her parents were out on the deck drinking coffee in their robes. They looked disheveled. Her brothers weren't to be seen.

Her grandfather said, “The lodge needs to be stained every five years. The decks need to be painted every three. All the paperwork is in my desk.”

She stopped and squinted at him.

“The keys are in the pocket of the vest,” he said. “Maybe your mom and dad will come visit you once a year.”

Hattie realized what was happening, but she couldn't speak. Her eyes stung with tears.

“It's not about blood,” he said, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand. “It's about the
knot.”

O
n an unseasonably warm fall day in the eastern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming, game warden Joe Pickett heard the call from dispatch over his pickup radio:

“Please meet the reporting party on County Road 307 at the junction of County Road 62. RP claims he was attempting to cross public land when shots were fired in his direction. The RP claims his vehicle was struck by bullets. Assailant is unknown.”

Joe paused a moment to let the message sink in, then snatched the mike from its cradle on the dashboard.

“This is GF-24. Are we talking about the junction up above Indian Paintbrush Basin?”

“Affirmative.”

“I can be there in fifteen minutes,” he said, glancing at his
mirrors and pulling over to the side of the two-lane highway five miles west of Winchester. The highway was clear in both directions with the exception of a hay combine lumbering westbound a mile in front of him. His tires had been scattering loose stalks of hay since he'd turned off the interstate.

Joe drove into the borrow pit and swung the truck around in a U-turn. He knew of an old gravel two-track that would cut across swaths of public and ranch land and emerge on the crest of Indian Paintbrush Basin. The shortcut would save him twenty minutes as opposed to backtracking to the interstate and going around. If the sheriff were to respond, it would take at least forty-five minutes for a deputy to get out there from town.

Before the call had come, Joe was patrolling the northern flank of his district, keeping an eye out for a local miscreant named Bryce Pendergast, whom Joe had arrested the year before on assault and felony narcotics charges. Pendergast had been convicted and sent to the State Honor Farm in Riverton, but had recently walked away and was last seen climbing into a rusted-out white van driven by an unknown accomplice. A BOLO had been put out for him, and Joe surmised that Pendergast might visit his grandmother in Winchester, but it turned out he hadn't. The old woman said not only had Bryce not been there, but that he owed her $225, and if he showed up without it she would call the cops. Joe liked the idea of putting Bryce in jail twice.

But a live situation trumped a cold one.

“Are there any injuries?” Joe asked the dispatcher, knowing the conversation was likely being monitored by other game
wardens across the State of Wyoming as well as law enforcement and nosy neighbors throughout Twelve Sleep County.

“Negative,” the female dispatcher said. “The party reports bullet holes in the sidewall of his truck, but they didn't hit anybody.”

“Yikes.”

“I'll ask the RP to stay out of the line of fire but remain at the scene until you get there.”

“Do you have a name for the RP?” Joe asked, flipping open his spiral notebook to a fresh page while driving down the rough road, then uncapping a pen with his teeth.

The name was Burton Hanks of Casper. While Joe bumped up and down in the cab, he scrawled the name and Hanks's cell phone number on the pad. His two-year-old yellow Labrador, Daisy, fixated on the wavery pen strokes as if she desperately wanted to snatch the pen out of his grip and chew it into oblivion, which she would if she got the chance.

“Did you run the name?” Joe asked the dispatcher.

“Affirmative. He's got a general license deer tag and said he is attempting to scout Area 25.”

Joe nodded to himself. Area 25 was a massive and mountainous hunting area that included mountains, breaklands, and huge grassy swales. The official opening day was October 15, a few weeks away. Meaning Hanks was likely a trophy hunter out on a scout to identify the habitat of the biggest buck deer. Locals would literally wait until the opener to go up there, but serious trophy hunters would be out well in advance to mark their territory.

Joe had mixed feelings when it came to serious trophy hunters, but he put them aside.

As he motored down the washboarded county road, leaving a plume of dust behind him, the issue wasn't scouting or trophy hunting or the ethics of trophy hunters. The issue was contained in two words:
shots fired
.

•   •   •

B
EFORE HE REACHED
the foothills to begin his climb into the timber and out the other side to Indian Paintbrush Basin, a herd of seventy to eighty pronghorn antelope looked up and watched him pass from where they grazed among the sagebrush. A herd that big—all does and fawns—meant there would be a bruiser of a buck somewhere watching over his harem, keeping them in line. Joe saw the buck over the next small hill. The animal was heavy-bodied and alert, with impressive curled horns with ivory tips and an alpha-male strut to his step.

Over the next hill, five young bachelor bucks, like pimply-faced adolescents with too much time on their hands and testosterone in their blood, milled about in a tight circle butting heads and, Joe assumed, plotting a coup attempt against the big buck to take charge of the harem. The bachelors strutted and butted at each other, and watched Joe go by with what looked like lopsided sneers.

Joe checked his wristwatch as he nosed his pickup through a steep-sided notch in the hill that would narrow ahead before the road climbed the last rise. It was two-thirty in the afternoon.
He was expected home by six so he and his wife, Marybeth, could attend his daughter Lucy's musical at the Saddlestring High School. She was a costar in a politically correct production he'd never heard of and was scheduled to sing a song called “Diversity.” He didn't want to miss it, yet he did. Nevertheless, he hoped the shots-fired incident could be resolved quickly enough that he could make it home on time.

As the road got rougher and he pitched about within the cab, Daisy placed both her paws on the dashboard for balance and stared through the front windshield as if to provide navigation support.

“Almost there,” Joe said to her, shifting into four-wheel-drive low to climb the rise. The surface of the old two-track was dry and loose. He liked the idea of coming onto the scene from an unexpected direction. The sudden appearance of a green Game and Fish vehicle sometimes froze the parties in a dispute and gave him time to assess the situation on his own before confronting them or figuring out what to do. Most of all, it allowed him to see a situation with his own eyes before the involved parties weighed in.

•   •   •

H
E BROKE OVER THE RIDGE
and the vista to the east was clear and stunning: the foothills gave way to a huge bowl of grass miles across in every direction. The bowl—called Indian Paintbrush Swale, after the state's official flower—was rimmed on three sides by timbered mountains either dark with pine in
shadow or bright green if fused with afternoon sun. Between the swale and where Joe cleared the ridge top was a late-model maroon Chevy Avalanche faux pickup parked just off the county road. Two men stood with their backs to him at first, then wheeled around, obviously surprised that he'd come from behind.

One of the men, standing near the front of the Avalanche, was tall and heavy with a long mustache that dropped to his jawline around both sides of his mouth. He wore a battered brown cowboy hat with a high crown and had a deeply creased and weathered face that indicated he either worked outside or spent a lot of his hours outdoors. The second man looked to be around the same age—fifty-five to sixty—but was clean-shaven and softer in features. He was hatless but wore a starched chamois shirt and new jeans that looked hours out of the box.

The man in the hat waved Joe over. The second man was obviously subordinate to the large man and hung back to stay out of the way and observe.

Joe put his pickup into park and let Daisy out. The dog followed him a few inches from his boot heels and kept her head down, sniffing the grass and sagebrush along the way.

The man in the cowboy hat, Burton Hanks, said he was a little surprised Joe didn't know of him.

“I'm the guy who broke the Boone and Crockett record for a mule deer in Wyoming last fall,” Hanks said. “Scored 201 and three-eighths overall. Six points on the right side and five on the left. The inside spread was twenty-eight and a quarter,” he said proudly.

“No offense,” Joe said, “but I don't pay much attention to records. I'm here because someone reported shots fired. I assume you're the reporting party.”

Hanks was chastened, but said, “That's me.”

“So,” Joe said, “who was shooting at whom?”

“Some third-world asshole shot at us!” Hanks bellowed, gesturing toward his pickup. “All we were doing was starting to cross that basin down there. Come look at this if you don't believe me.”

Joe followed Hanks around the Avalanche.

“Here's the evidence,” Hanks said, pointing at the small bullet hole in the metal sheeting of the rear bumper guard.

“Yup,” Joe said, leaning close to the bumper. The hole was clean and the bullet was likely lodged somewhere in the sidewall of the bed. “Eight inches lower and it would have hit the tire,” Joe said.

“And five inches higher and it might have punctured the fuel line and blown us to kingdom come,” Hanks added. “Here, there's another one,” he said, pressing his index finger against a second hole in the sidewall a few feet in back of the cab. The bullet had pierced the outside sheet metal and exited on the top rail of the pickup bed, leaving angry sharp tongues of steel. Which meant the shot had been fired from a lower elevation than the truck at the time, Joe thought.

“Let me get a couple of pictures,” Joe said, returning to his own truck for his digital camera. “Did you get a look at who did the shooting?”

“Hell yes,” Hanks said. “And you can put away that camera,
Warden. I can point you at who shot at us and you can go down there and arrest him right now.”

Joe said, “You mean he's still there?”

“That's what I'm saying. You can borrow my binocs and I'll point him out to you.”

Joe was surprised. Previously, a series of likely scenarios had circled around in the back of his mind: the shooter was also a trophy hunter intending to spook the competition; the shooter was zeroing in his rifle when the Avalanche got in the way; the shooter was poaching elk and was surprised by the intrusion. It didn't occur to him that the shooter would still be in the basin twenty minutes later.

He frowned. The last thing he needed—or wanted—was a situation where a man with a rifle was hidden away in isolated terrain. A whole new set of scenarios—more dangerous than the first set—began to emerge. Joe knew that by the time the sheriff's department arrived, the shooter could either escape or bunker in for a long standoff.

Hanks handed Joe a pair of Zeiss Victory 8×42 binoculars and arched his eyebrows in anticipation of a compliment. The binoculars were known to be the best, and were among the most expensive optics available, at over $2,000 a pair. Joe took them and refrained from commenting on them. But looking through them was like being transported into a clearer and sharper world than what was available to the naked eye.

Joe swept the grassy basin and the lenses filled with the backs of hundreds of sheep he hadn't noticed before. The herd was so
large it had melded into the scenery of the basin but now it was obvious. The sheep were moving only a few inches at a time as they grazed on the grass, heads down, like a huge cumulus cloud barely moving across the sky. Unlike cattle, sheep snipped the grass close to the surface and left the range with the appearance of a manicured golf green. Which is one of the primary reasons sheepmen and cattlemen had gone to war over a century before.

“All I see is sheep,” Joe said to Hanks.

“Keep going,” Hanks said. “Look right square in the middle of that basin.”

Joe found a distant structure of some kind and focused in.

“The sheep wagon?” Joe said.

The ancient wagon was parked in the middle of the giant swale. It had a rounded sheet metal top painted white that fit like a muffin top on a squared-off frame. Sheep wagons were hitched to vehicles and towed to where the herds were and left, sometimes for weeks. They had long tongues for towing, water barrels cinched to the sides, small windows on the sides of the metal cover skin, and narrow double doors on the front. The black snout of a chimney pipe poked through the roof.

There wasn't a pickup parked beside the wagon but a saddled horse was tied to a picket pin, as well as a black-and-white blue heeler dog.

“That's where the shots came from,” Hanks said.

“And all you were doing was going down the road minding your own business?”

“I don't like the insinuation,” Hanks said haughtily. “We were driving on a county road through private land, legal as hell. When I drove the Avalanche down there from up here, I heard the first bullet hit before I even heard a shot. Then the second one hit. I stopped the truck and glassed the basin and saw that sheep wagon. The guy who shot at us had the top door open on the wagon and I could see a rifle barrel sticking out. I never saw him clearly. He didn't close the door until we hightailed it back up here and called 911.”

Joe lowered the binoculars and handed them back. “You're sure you didn't do anything to provoke him?” he asked. “Were you spooking his sheep?”

“I goddamned told you exactly what happened,” Hanks said, turning to his friend. “Isn't that right, Bill? I didn't leave anything out, did I?”

Bill said, “Nope. All we were doing was driving along the road and that nut down there started popping off at us. We didn't threaten him or nothing. And we weren't even close to his sheep yet.”

“Why are you even asking these questions?” Hanks said to Joe. “Don't you believe us? You saw the bullet holes.”

“I did. But this is the first time I ever heard of him getting aggressive and shooting at somebody.”

“You know him?” Hanks asked, incredulous.

“His name is Ander Esti. I recognize his horse. He's been around this country for a long time—before I ever got here. He's not the type to just shoot at somebody.”