“Yes.”
“Joe, my friend, how are things going? Are you hanging in there?”
Her tone was that of a lifelong chum who was concerned with his health and welfare, which puzzled him.
“I’m fine,” he said haltingly. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m getting hammered by the press asking questions about how you found Birch Wardell out on that road. They want to know how he got hit by your car, and all of that, you know?”
Joe took the phone away from his ear and stared at it.
“I hit Birch Wardell with my car because he was standing in the middle of the road,” Joe said flatly. “It was an accident. Then I took him to the hospital and stayed with him until I was sure he was okay.”
“Joe, you don’t need to use that tone,” she said soothingly. “I’m on your side here, you know? They just keep asking me about you being there when Lamar Gardiner was killed, then you being there again when Birch Wardell was hurt.”
Joe felt a flush of anger. “Are you suggesting I had something to do with those incidents?”
“Oh, God no,” she said. “I’m on your side.”
“What other side is there?” Joe asked. “And who exactly is ‘hammering’ you with questions?” In Saddlestring, there was the
There was a long pause, and then she filled the silence with a rush of words. “That’s not why I called, Joe. Lamar Gardiner scheduled a public meeting for Friday night on the USFS strategic plan for this district . . . you know, the road closures. He announced the meeting quite a few weeks ago and I’m going to go ahead and chair it. I was hoping you would come and offer support. I know Lamar’s policies were controversial, and I could use your help on this.”
The quick change of direction caught Joe by surprise.
“I can be there,” Joe said, although he immediately wished he hadn’t.
“Great, great. Thank you, Joe.” Her chirpiness resumed. “You be careful out there, my friend. Things may be a little dicey until we get all this stuff figured out with the Sovereigns—and who knows if they’ll go after state government representatives as well as federal land managers.”
“Are the Sovereigns being targeted for Birch Wardell’s ambush?” Joe asked. He had heard nothing of this.
“I’m not at liberty to say,”
Then she wished him a good day and hung up. Joe listened to the silence on the phone for a moment, still not sure what had just transpired.
The conversation left him flummoxed. He wished he had recorded it so he could replay it later, and try to make sense of it. Melinda Strickland seemed to be implying things—that Joe was the subject of controversy and suspicion, that forces were out to get her, that maybe Joe was aligned with those forces—while at the same time assuring him that everything was fine and that she and Joe were working well together. Her backtracking, when he asked her for specifics, he thought wryly, left a smell of burning rubber as she floored it into reverse.
He turned off his cell phone so she couldn’t call again.
Instead of returning home and to his office, Joe turned toward the BLM joint range-management study area. He wanted a clearer picture of the crash site and the terrain that Birch Wardell described. It took nearly an hour and a half on drifted-in gravel roads to get to the place where Wardell had seen the light-colored pickup that had fled from him and led to the accident.
Joe stopped in the road and looked up the gently rising hill where Wardell said he had first seen the other vehicle. Gunmetal-gray sagebrush dotted the hillside, each bush supporting a shark-fin wedge of drifted snow. The rest of the ground was blown clean of snow, revealing gray dirt and yellow grass. It was the first grass he had seen for a couple of weeks.
From where he sat in the idling truck, Joe could make out tire tracks in the crushed grass that led from the road he was now on to the top of the hill. The tracks, he assumed, were Wardell’s. On the top of the hill, against the sky, he could see a broken signpost. It was all just as Wardell had described it.
Joe reached down and shoved the pickup into four-wheel drive, and ascended the hill, staying in Wardell’s tracks. At the top, near the broken signpost, he stopped. Beyond him, the breaklands stretched for miles until they melted into the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. The terrain was deceptive. At first glance, it looked flat and barren, like gentle corduroy folds. But the folds obscured rugged draws and arroyos, and small sharp canyons. Pockets of thick, tall Rocky Mountain juniper punctuated the expanse.
With his binoculars, Joe swept the bottom of the hill, where Wardell said he’d wrecked his pickup. Sure enough, through the thick brush, Joe saw the back bumper of a BLM pickup pointing toward the clouds. The truck had crashed headfirst into a steep draw. It had been there for two days, and the BLM had not yet sent a tow truck to pull it out. For once, Joe was pleased with bureaucratic inertia.
Joe found another set of tracks on the opposite hill that led up and over the top. Those tracks no doubt belonged to the vehicle Birch Wardell had been chasing. Slowly, Joe studied the bottom of the hill and the sharp draw that stretched out from both sides of the wrecked truck like a stiletto slash. He could see no obvious place to cross. There
Joe sighed and lowered his glasses. How in the hell did he do it? He thought about the possibility of a ramp or bridge that the vandal had carried with him. Maybe he carried it in the back of his truck, and laid it across the draw. But that was too far-fetched, Joe decided. The distance across the arroyo was too great, and the logistics of carrying, deploying, and retrieving a ramp while being pursued were impractical.
He sat back and thought about it. Maxine crawled across the seat and put her large, warm head in his lap. He studied the opposite hill, the dual sets of tracks up from the bottom of the draw, and the bumper of the wrecked truck, sticking up obscenely from the heavy brush.
While he thought, a pronghorn antelope doe and her yearling twins crossed in front of him. Their coloring was perfect camouflage for this terrain—finely drawn patches of dark tan, white, and black that blended in with the
